3D-PMDC: A parallelized morphological wavelet codec for 3D medical datasets and teleradiology applications

Modern medical imaging modalities produce increasingly large datasets. This trend can be in contrast with the computation and transmission time requirements coming from critical teleradiology applications. Multidimensional image compression techniques can be considered as enabling solutions on condition that they are able to guarantee a suitable combination of rate-distortion and computational performance which fulfill all the application domain requirements. In this work, we present a parallel version of our 3D Embedded Morphological Dilation Coding algorithm that allows a significant reduction of computation costs and the concurrent conservation of coding performance and of other relevant bitstream properties. A comparison with the recently released JPEG2000 part 10 (JP3D) standard put in evidence the value of the proposed solution, especially for teleradiology applications over heterogeneous networks.