Development of 3-D stereo endoscopic PACS viewer

Stereo PACS (picture archiving and communication system) is not available yet because of some limitations of medical stereo image software and viewing devices. As a stereo PACS viewer, the authors designed two functions. One is selecting and viewing a multiplexed stereo image directly, and the other is selecting a stereo pair image (left and right sides both) and merging the stereo pair image into a multiplexed image in software. For the medical image compression of 3-D (stereo) endoscopic images, the authors used JPEG and wavelet compression and to determine an acceptable compression rate using PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio). As a result, they came to the conclusion that a medically acceptable image compression rate should have a PSNR of above about 40[dB] (JPEG (5:1), wavelet (10:1))