Efficient visualization of encoded Fourier transform infrared microscopic data of osteoporotic bone

Fourier transform IR microspectroscopy (FTIRM) of bone slices has become a major research tool to analyze the chemical constitution of calcified structures. Qualitative as well quantitative measures of bone components using this technique have been shown to be useful in the characterization of normal bone in both animal and human specimens. Furthermore, the technique can be used to characterize bone diseases like osteoporosis and the effects of different chemical constitutions on bone structures. However, the ever-increasing number of FTIRM studies is yielding an amount of data that is becoming unmanageable in terms of size for the purpose of storage. We address this problem by applying two different lossless coding techniques to the images generated by the studies. Compression ratios as high as 100:1 are obtained by coding the lower bit levels of the image while retaining the information that is used by the specialists