A Study on Quality Assessment for Medical Ultrasound Video Compressed via HEVC

The quality of experience and quality of service provided in the healthcare sector are critical in evaluating the reliable delivery of the healthcare services provided. Medical images and videos play a major role in modern e-health services and have become an integral part of medical data communication systems. The quality evaluation of medical images and videos is an essential process, and one of the ways of addressing it is via the use of quality metrics. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of seven state-of-the-art video quality metrics with respect to compressed medical ultrasound video sequences. We study the performance of each video quality metric in representing the diagnostic quality of the video, by evaluating the correlation of each metric with the subjective opinions of medical experts. The results indicate that the visual information fidelity, structural similarity index, and universal quality index metrics show good correlation with the subjective scores provided by medical experts. The tests also investigate the performance of the emerging video compression standard, high-efficiency video coding-HEVC, for medical ultrasound video compression. The results show that, using HEVC with the considered ultrasound video sequences, a diagnostically reliable compressed ultrasound video can be obtained for compression with values of the quantization parameter up to 35.