Lossless compression of DICOM images using genetic algorithm

The numerous medical images generated by various imaging devices require a huge amount of storage space and minimum transmission bandwidth. So, it is necessary to use an appropriate technique for compression of medical images in order to meet the above concerns. This paper proposes a technique for lossless compression of significant parts by extracting the region of interest in DICOM images. The extracted region is compressed using Huffman encoding and genetic algorithm for the enhancement of compression ratio. Additionally, the value of PSNR has also been calculated. When the results of the proposed technique are compared with the previous method, it is found that there is an increase of more than 400% in the compression ratio. It also provides an average increase of 20% in the compression ratio by using Huffman encoding.