A cost effective solution for digital cardiac angiogram archiving using lossless image compression

A cost effective solution for a cineangiogram archive is proposed based on a hybrid method of lossless image compression. Compared with several other approaches, the authors solution achieves the highest average compression ratio of 3.9:1, and yet the shortest decoding time. Decompression contains two steps: (1) from a compressed cineangiogram file on a disk to half decoded data in computer memory; (2) from the data in memory to fully decoded images in a display frame buffer. For an image sequence of 512×512 resolution, step-1 takes less than 200 ms/frame, and step-2 less than 28 ms/frame on a Sparc-10 workstation. Thus after step-1 loading, cine looping with either DSA or image mode can reach to 25 fps, suitable for clinical applications