Implementation of region based medical image compression for telemedicine application

There is an increasing demand for transmitting medical images for telemedicine application. These medical images are rich in radiological information and the file sizes associated with it are also large. Medical images such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) produce human body pictures in digital form and they produce excessive amount of data. So compression is necessary for storage and transmission purpose. Image compression enhances the performance of any digital system by reducing the time and cost with or without reduction in image quality. The algorithms used in this paper utilize Region Of Interest (ROI) based compression which again increases the compression ratio compared to the traditional block based methods. The results of 3 different classical algorithms with and without ROI are compared and the results are reported. ROI is coded with good fidelity than NROI and also incorporates progressive transmission. Distortion rates and compression rates are evaluated for all images and the results are compared.