A novel progressive thick slab paradigm for volumetric medical image compression and navigation

In this paper, we propose a novel thick slab paradigm which provides an efficient scheme to navigate through large three dimensional (3-D) medical data sets within the framework of wavelet based lossless volumetric compression. We also propose a 3-D wavelet-like multi-resolution decomposition to perform 3-D image compression, which provides better compression ratio and 3 times faster decoding than JPEG-2000 for large data sets of computed tomography modality, along with a clinical workflow for navigation application. The proposed method suits radiology applications better than JPEG-2000 as it improves the productivity of radiologists by reducing their waiting time while the data is being transferred from a remote database over the network, along with reduction in diagnosis time, by providing an efficient navigation scheme with high compression performance.