Compression of Medical Images using their Symmetry

Compression of an image involves reducing its size to some extent without much changes in its quality and the contents. Compression of medical images plays a significant role in the field of telemedicine. For example, treatment of patients at places where specialized doctors are not available requires transmission of the medical images to places where the required doctors are available. Since medical data is huge in size, it requires high bandwidth at both the sender side as well as the receiver side. Compressed medical images can also be stored in a standard database which may be accessed by doctors and researchers for their case studies. It has already been proved that mostly the human body possess bilateral symmetry. This means that an organ of the human body can be divided into two symmetrical halves by simply drawing a vertical line down their centers. This paper presents a new approach for compressing the medical images by making use of their symmetry feature. This approach helps in compressing the medical images to a greater extent. This method involves transmission of any one of the symmetrical half of the image along with the differential information of the two halves in encoded form. At the receiver end, the original image can be regenerated without much observable changes. The proposed approach also determines the best pair of compression techniques for encoding the two parts of the image to be transmitted.