Lossless compression of medical images based on HEVC intra coding

The recent introduction of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard provides opportunities to improve medical image compression in picture archiving and communications systems. In this paper, we propose improvements to the HEVC intra coding process for lossless compression of grayscale anatomical medical images, which are characterized by their large amount of edges. Specifically, we propose alternative angular and planar prediction modes that are based on sample-wise differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) with an increased range of directionalities. We also propose an implementation of the DPCM decoding process that maintains the block-wise coding structure of HEVC. Evaluation results on various medical images show that the proposed DPCM modes efficiently predict the large amount of edges in these images achieving bit-rate savings of up to 15%.