A New Approach to Compression of Medical Ultrasound Images Using Wavelet Transform

In this paper, a new lossy technique based on wavelet transform for compression of breast ultrasound images is presented. The experiments are performed on 16 different wavelet functions and the quality of reconstructed images is evaluated by using Compression Ratio (CR), Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE), Normalized Absolute Error (NAE), and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) criterion. An ultrasonographer performed the subjective assessment. This study shows that among the utilized wavelets, db1 has a qualitative and quantitative potential to compress the breast ultrasound images. The results show that the proposed algorithm can increase the compression ratio while the clinical information of the image is preserved.