Diagnostically Lossless Compression of X-Ray Angiographic Images through Background Suppression

Summary form only given. X-ray angiographic (angio) images are widely used for identifying irregularities in the vascular system. Because of their high spatial resolution and the increasingly amount of X-ray angio images generated, compression of these images is becoming increasingly appealing. In this paper, we introduce a diagnostically lossless compression scheme for X-ray angio images. The coding scheme relies on a novel method based on ray casting and a-shapes for distinguishing the clinically relevant Region of Interest from the background. The background is then suppressed to increase data redundancy, allowing to achieve a higher coding performance. Experimental results suggest that the proposed scheme correctly identifies the Region of Interest in X-ray angio images and achieves more than 2 bits per pixel reduction in average as compared to the case of compression with no background suppression. Results are reported here for 20 out of 25 images compressed using various lossless compression methods.