Lossless compression of Fluoroscopy medical images using correlation and the combination of Run-length and Huffman coding

Medical centers produce a massive amount of sequential medical images for examinations such as CT, MRI and Fluoroscopy, where each examination of a patient consists of a series of images. This takes up a large amount of storage space, in addition to the cost and time incurred during transmission. For medical data, lossless compression is preferred to the greater gains of lossy compression, in the interest of accuracy. This paper proposes a new method for lossless compression of pharynx and esophagus fluoroscopy images, using correlation and combination of Run Length and Huffman coding on the difference pairs of images classified by correlation. From the experimental results obtained, the proposed method achieved improved performance with a compression ratio of 11.41 for the proposed combination of Run-length and Huffman coding (RLHM-D) on the difference images as compared to 1.31 for the standard images.