A Fast Predictive Lossless Coder for fMRI Data Sets

We present a novel lossless compression algorithm which compresses sequences of three-dimensional (3D) volumes collected during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. The large data sets involved in this popular biomedical application necessitate fast and efficient compression methods. We propose to use 3D prediction, temporal decorrelation and entropy coding with context modeling for encoding the fMRI scans after preprocessing with the region-of-interest (ROI) masking. The proposed algorithm is conceptually simple and can achieve fast implementation and efficient coding performance. We illustrate computer simulations to show advantages over conventional coding methods.