Optimal Channel Coding for Scalable Wireless Transmission of 3D Regions of Interest in 3D Medical Images

A novel method for 3D scalable medical image coding with optimized 3D region of interest (3D-RoI) coding was recently proposed. This paper presents one major contribution that enhances this previous work, namely an optimal channel coding method for scalable wireless transmission of 3D regions of interest in 3D medical images. The method is presented in the context of telemedicine, where 3D medical images are first source-coded for storage on a central server and later channel-coded, when request for transmission of a 3D-RoI is initiated. The method is a two-tiered approach: Tier-1 is a source coding scheme, while Tier-2 is a joint source/channel coding scheme where 3D-RoI coding is jointly performed with channel coding. The robustness of the proposed method is evaluated over Rayleigh-fading channels with rate-compatible punctured turbo codes. Comparisons are made with the cases of equal error protection and unequal error protection. Evaluations results on real 3D medical images show a significant improvement in reconstruction quality of the received images, in terms of the average peak signal-to-noise ratio.