Scalable compression of volumetric images

An important problem in medical imaging is that of efficient volumetric image compression. In addition to compression efficiency, scalable representations which allow access to the data at various qualities up to and including lossless reproduction are particularly important. Also important is the ability to access local regions of the volumetric data set or to alter the fidelity or resolution with which a selected region is accessed. In this paper, we first consider bounds to the efficacy of three dimensional transform techniques. We then propose a particular technique, based on motion adaptive wavelet lifting, which is able to realize the goals of high compression efficiency, lossy to lossless scalability, and efficient random access, all within a single compressed data stream.