Volumetric image compression of multifocal multiphoton microscopy imaging data

Multifocal multiphoton microscopy (MMM) is one of the most powerful microscopic technologies for in vivo 3D tissue imaging. When MMM uses more penetrating near-infrared light as the light source, it has minimal photodamage and photobleaching. Nowadays MMM has been applied in neuronal imaging, tumor physiology study and so on. The high resolution leads to huge amount data. Volumetric image compression algorithm can be used to compress data for storage and transmission. Two image compression methods, 2D JPEG2000 and 3D SPIHT, were used to the volumetric data of MMM. Here we implemented the above algorithms to compress the three dimensional imaging data of MMM, and make a comparison of the performance of two compression algorithms. All the reconstructed slices of using 3D SPIHT algorithm performed in measurement and visualization are better than that of 2D JPEG2000.