What compression methods are available for medical images?
There are many different compression methods available to be applied to medical images. The two broad categories of image compression are lossy (also known as irreversible) and lossless compression methods. Lossless compression methods use statistical redundancy within in an image to allow for perfect image reconstructions. However, the decrease in file size with lossless compression is only 2:1-4:1 for medical images2. This small decrease in file size does not overcome the issue of large file sizes and teleradiology applications. RLE and JPEG-LS are examples of lossless compression methods. Lossy compression methods can decrease file sizes by very large ratios but do not perfectly reproduce the original image. Lossy compression is used if some loss of fidelity is acceptable. Lossy data compression algorithms introduce relatively minor differences and represent the picture, video, or audio using fewer bits3. JPEG and JPEG2000 are the two most common methods of compression that are appl
