Compression of Medical Sensor Data [Exploratory DSP]

Over the course of the last 20 years, compression has evolved from a somewhat esoteric domain of mathematics and computer science into a ubiquitous consumer electronics technology. Given the prevalence and success of speech, audio, image, and video compression algorithms in consumer electronics, it is surprising that many high-speed digital signal processing (DSP) systems such as wireless infrastructure, radar processing, and medical imaging sensor subsystems have until recently not considered compression as an alternative for reducing data acquisition bandwidth and storage bottlenecks. This article describes sensor compression for medical transducers that is an integral part of the high-speed DSP transport and storage infrastructure itself, and compressing and decompressing hundreds or thousands of sensor channels in real time. While we certainly acknowledge the benefits of compressing medical images that are output from image reconstruction, our goal is to describe the benefits of compressing medical sensor data before image reconstruction. When combined with low-cost, off-the-shelf computer and networking components, sensor compression reduces the costs of the medical imaging data acquisition, transport, and storage infrastructure. By reducing medical imaging equipment bill of material (BOM) costs, integrated medical sensor compression and decompression will ultimately reduce the cost of medical care.