Assessment of a lossy image compression technique applied to cardiac images in nuclear medicine

The aim of image compression techniques is to reduce the amount of data required to represent images, so that they can be transmitted and stored more efficiently. As in medical applications it is desirable that no information be lost during the compression/decompression process, most researchers and clinicians have used lossless compression in spite of the low compression rates achieved by those methods. The authors have compressed nuclear cardiology images using the discrete cosine transform algorithm. Results have shown that the use of such a lossy compression algorithm permits one to achieve high compression rates yet preserving all the information required for both visual inspection and parameter calculation