Volumetric Medical Image Compression and Reconstruction for Interactive

Visualization in Surgical Planning

Abhirup Patra (gtg795j@prism.gatech.edu)
May D. Wang (maywang@bme.gatech.edu)
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0535, USA

This paper discusses different compression schemes taking advantage of

interpolation methods for 3D volumetric reconstruction of medical imaging data. We
developed a volume composition system that uses different compression schemes
combined with interpolation algorithms to facilitate the rapid visualization of volumetric
images. The quality and speed were compared to evaluate the best choice for volume
rendering using data compression by region of interest (ROI), discrete cosine transform
(DCT) and ROI combined with DCT techniques. A set of volumetric images of human
arm was used. The lossless techniques allow for perfect reconstruction of the original
images, yield modest compression rates, while the methods that yield higher compression
rates are lossy, which is not permissible in medical imaging. In the first technique, we
segmented the 2D images depending on our ROI. Thus, it addressed the separation of the
imaging volume into important (flesh) and unimportant regions (blue gel), by using
absolute threshold as one of the methods. The regions differed in their grayscale
characteristics or in their importance levels. Medical applications require that we encode
flesh in a lossless manner. Unfortunately, there is no principle way of choosing the
absolute threshold, thus another method of ROI implementation was done by means of
snake. This energy-minimizing spline guided by external constraint forces and influenced
by image forces pulled the snake towards features such as lines and edges. This helped in
extracting the specific area, without loosing relevant information.
The other scheme involved implementing DCT image compression with an 8 x 8
block for each of the 76 slices, using the standard DCT formula. Quantization was done to
get the integer representation of floating point DCT coefficients and was coded with the run-
length algorithm read in zigzag pattern. Run repeating string was encoded with two bytes.
The first byte represented the number of characters in the run i.e. run count and the
second was for the run value. Back reconstruction was done to get the original
coefficients, followed by inverse DCT. The difference was in the appearance of non-
uniform blocks in the compressed image, with a SNR value of 31-33 dB for the slices.
Also, we implemented the same DCT algorithm on the ROI based clinically relevant
data.
To generate new intermediate value for densitometric visualization using existing
voxels, three different interpolation schemes were used: nearest, linear and cubic. We
converted RGB values to gray level image to preserve the resolution for processing the
features. Interpolation also helps towards enhancing the image quality. We observed that
with combination of ROI and cubic interpolation, we get a high SNR and an enhanced
volume, but we sacrificed on the volume rendering time. Comparing the SNR ratios for
different 3D reconstruction interpolation techniques, ROI based compression in
conjunction with linear interpolation rendered the optimized 3D volume.

Proceedings of the Data Compression Conference (DCC’03)

1068-0314/03 $17.00 © 2003 IEEE