A Hybrid Method for Medical Image Compression in Mobile Picture Archiving and Communication System

Mobile picture archiving and communication system (PACS) is a powerful tool for medical image management and transmission. However, the increasing amounts of images pose a severe challenge to the transmission bandwidth and the limited spaces of mobile PACS. In this study, we proposed a hybrid image compression algorithm based on shearlet and wavelet. In this method, the region of interest of the image was losslessly compressed by shearlet transform with better sparse expression, and the background region of the image was lossy compressed by the wavelet transform with lower complexity. Comparative analysis showed that the proposed hybrid compression algorithm achieved the best compression efficiency and transmission efficiency. The hybrid image compression method can effectively improve the image transmission efficiency, which provides an efficient solution for diagnostic image service in mobile PACS.