Intelligent Compression of Medical Images with Texture Information

Sindhu.R Easwari Engineering College, Anna University Chennai Email: vrsindhu85@gmail.com

AbstractTechnology in medical imaging is so rapidly advancing that the pressure to keep up pace in all the allied technology is tremendous. There has been an increase in the number of medical images captured, an increase in the demand for the benefit from the diagnosis of the new images and an increase in the number of methodologies that can transmit medical information from the images correctly. DICOM has been keeping pace with the standardization in representation of any medical image. This paper focuses work on DICOM for overall applicability. From the above it is evident that three issues are of vital importance when it comes to keeping up pace with the rapidly improving medical imaging technology. This paper strives to do justice to the three, namely: memory requirement, bandwidth constraint and battery resource constraint without compromising on the quality of the medical image as it could be extremely detrimental to precise and perfect diagnosis. While taking up each issue the keynote ideas will be detailed. Keywords-- ROI, Adaptive SPIHT, texture, DICOM

of the part of the body under focus in the image. Taking care of the above constraints is bound to have a small impact in the intensity levels of the various regions of the image. Slight changes in texture or the degree of uniformity of a feature may vary. So, texture based edge detection is performed before compression so as to serve as a reference to the original textural patterns of the image. The edge information superimposed on the reconstructed image which has been compressed taking into account all these three factors would aid in a better telemedicine practice. A. About DICOM The DICOM Standards Committee exists to create and maintain international standards for communication of biomedical diagnostic and therapeutic information in disciplines that use digital images and associated data. The overall objectives of DICOM can be outlined as: to improve workflow efficiency between imaging systems and other information systems in healthcare environments worldwide. DICOM is a cooperative standard. Connectivity works because vendors cooperate in testing via either scheduled public demonstrations, over the Internet, or during private test sessions. Every major diagnostic medical imaging vendor in the world has incorporated the Standard into its product design, and most are actively participating in the enhancement of the Standard. Most of the professional societies throughout the world have supported and are participating in the enhancement of the Standard as well. DICOM is used or will soon be used by virtually every medical profession that utilizes images within the healthcare industry. These include cardiology, dentistry, endoscopy, mammography, ophthalmology, orthopedics, pathology, pediatrics, radiation therapy, radiology, surgery, etc. An approximate illustration of how DICOM goes about in building adaptability across the stream of heterogeneous medical images and vendors across the topmost of the seven ISO layers of the network is shown below.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Since storage space demands in hospitals are continually increasing compression of the recorded medical images is the need of the hour. The more a particular image is compressed the more the number of new images that acquire memory. This would imply the need for a compression scheme that would give a very high compression ratio. Usually, the SPIHT (set partitioning in hierarchical trees) algorithm is commonly used on DICOM images. But the very high compression ratio usually comes with a price. This refers to the quality of the image. Given a particular compression ratio, the quality of the image reconstructed using the JPEG2000 [6] algorithm for compression would be better. This paper presents a method of employing both methods of compression in an intelligent manner to achieve both benefits. Then comes into picture the issue of energy constraints. While compressing and transmitting an image if the coefficients to be transmitted are of very large magnitude then more resources would be required for transmission. This is taken care of by employing energy efficient compression. But again medical images cannot afford the loss of important details for the sake of meeting battery constraints for telemedicine. This is also taken care of in the paper.And the regions of diagnostic importance are undisturbed in course of achieving energy efficiency. Another important characteristic, which is often the criterion or even the referred basis of diagnosis in medical images, is the texture of the various regions within the image. The texture of each area is of significance in often determining the morphology
978-1-4244-5586-7/10/$26.00 C 2010 IEEE

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Figure 1.Usage scenario (DICOM)

experienced. Secondly, not much computation energy is involved in the process. The extraction by hand is illustrated below.

Figure 2.Data exchange scenario

Figure 4. The input image MRI1

Figure 5. Mask generation (non-ROI) Figure 3.DICOM architecture (to an approximation)

At the application layer, the services and information objects address the following areas of functionality: Transmission and persistence of complete objects (such as images, waveforms and documents), Query and retrieval of such objects Performance of specific actions (such as printing images on film), Workflow management (support of wordlists and status information) and Quality and consistency of image appearance (both for display and print). Keeping in mind this pace, work on any format other than DICOM, especially when it comes to medical imaging would be vague. II. EXTRACTION

Figure 6. ROI

III.

ENCODING

An important characteristic in all medical images is that it can be classified into two areas easily. One area is the body part that is subject to diagnosis in the image. Another area is the background with less important information. So the first step in the paper is segmenting the image into two regions. One approach is suggested for this. One is the selection of the region of interest by hand and then superimposing the selected pixel matrix on an m*n matrix of zeroes, where m and n refer to the number of horizontal and vertical pixels in the image respectively. The background is left as such with zero values for the selected region. This is shown by fig. (2) and fig. (3) Respectively. Coming to the advantages of the method, a great degree of freedom to choose the ROI is

A. Energy efficient SPIHT The set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) is a very suitable method for compression of medical images as it offers a decent compression ratio. As a small preamble to SPIHT [1] method, it involves (1) exploitation of the hierarchical structure of the wavelet transform, by using a tree-based organization of the coefficients; (2). Partial ordering of the transformed coefficients by magnitude, with the ordering data not explicitly transmitted but recalculated by the decoder; and (3) ordered bit plane transmission of refinement bits for the coefficient values. This leads to a fully embedded bit stream with the maximum value coefficients at first and the minimum value coefficients at the end of the stream. So this scheme is applicable on the nonROI image. This is the region which must be exploited to make the compression energy efficient. Discrete wavelet transform is the transform made use of. Here the low frequency coefficients represent the identity of the signal while the high frequency coefficients represent the exacting details. Since this part of the image is of no diagnostic

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importance all the high frequency bands can be completely eliminated and only the LL component of the transform level be sent further. Reconstruction will not be perfect. But this is not needed for this region of the medical image. The advantage that remains out of doing this is that the compression time, the reconstruction time and peak signal to noise ratio is considerably reduced. We also obtain an enhanced compression ratio.

encoding. Alternatively, even the EBCOT encoder can be modified at the cost of a slightly increase in computational complexity. IV. TEXTURE BASED EDGE DETECTION

Figure 7. Geometric increase in S-trees (coefficient values withi which are partitioned in order of magnitude)

Texture refers to the degree of uniformity or continuity of a particular parameter, intensity here in an image. Texture is one important factor about medical images. In certain images texture becomes the basis for diagnosis also. Even the most famous edge detectors like Canny [2] are able to detect the edges for all particular intensities. So for the same intensity level, a large number of edges are obtained which is not always necessary for diagnosis. Often it is the textural differences that are indicative of the morphology of the body part within the image. So texture based edge detection is performed here The generic methodology using Gabor filter [7] for edge detection and the choice of the range of the parameters of the Gabor filter are important areas of work. The difference is illustrated in the example below.

Example image MRI3 (128*128)

Figure 8. Adaptive SPIHT

B. JPEG2000 on the ROI The most important information in the image lies in the Region of Interest. Quality after reconstruction is of outmost importance here. The JPEG algorithm [4], [5] ensures quality. Power consumptions are greatly ruled by the varying implementations of the JPEG algorithms. Compression here cannot be afforded to be made energy efficient as this will lead to loss of detailing information. After the discrete wavelet transform has been applied the bits are directly sent to the encoder. Here instead of partitioning into blocks as for the Embedded Block Code for Optimized Truncation (EBCOT), the bits are Huffman [3] or Run length coded directly, since the ROI selected is usually very small in size compared to whole image size. We can afford the decrease in bit rate on account of this for the sake of quality which is compromised by blocking artifacts whenever we go for splitting the image into blocks for any computation. Also the encoding and decoding computational complexities is drastically reduced as these are extremely simple methods of

Unnecessary and too many edges detected by Cannys method on MRI3

Texture based edge detection of MRI3

Figure 9.Texture based edge detection

V.

INTEGRATION

After performing the edge detection, the extraction process is done. The ROI is first compressed as discussed above and then the non-ROI. After both encoding processes are over, the bit stream transmitted contains the edge information, followed by the ROI with the non-ROI at the

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end. At the reconstruction side, the ROI bits followed by the non-ROI are reconstructed. Then the ROI, non-ROI and edge information are integrated to yield the final output image. VI.
RESULTS

Image Mri1.dcm Mri2.dcm

PSNR 34.43 35.87

MSE 1.20 1.05

CR 3.85 3.79

Enc Time 1.35 1.42

Dec Time 1.14 1.28

VII. CONCLUSION Thus the medical image has been intelligently compressed. The method strives to achieve an improvement in terms of PSNR, MSE, compression time and reconstruction time as well as a high compression ratio without detoriation of the image quality, especially where most needed i.e., the ROI. The paper also gives precise texture information to facilitate diagnosis and act as a reference line after reconstruction. VIII. FUTURE WORK The most demanding area is the need for a system which automatically extracts the region of interest and proceeds as stated above. But the pitfall is that such generalization is not of much use as ROI varies from image to image and patient to patient. Another step would be to make the edge detection adaptive and try for choice of measures that would minimize the Gabors ringing effect. The ROI can also be watermarked for security once the bit stream emerges from the encoder. This would prevent tamper and also provide for not only memory and energy efficient but also secure telemedicine. REFERENCES
[1] Said, A. & Pearlman, W. A., A New, Fast, and Efficient Image Codec Based on Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees. I.E.E.E. Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 243-250, (June 1996). [2] CANNY, JOHN, A computational approach to edge detection, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Vol. PAMI-8, pp. 679-698. Nov. 1986 [3] Gopal Lakhani, "Modified JPEG Huffman Coding," IEEE Trans.Image Processing, vol. 12, no. 2, pp.159-169, Feb. 2003 [4] JPEG2000 Part1: Core Coding System, Final Committee Draft (ISO/IEC FCD 15444-1), ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 N11855, March 2000. [5] JPEG2000 Part2: JPEG2000 Extension, Final Committee Draft (ISO/IEC FCD 15444-2), November 2001. [6] D.Taubman and M.Marcellin, JPEG2000: Image Compression Fundamentals, Standards and Practice, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2002. [7] CHEN Chung-Ming, LU Henry Horng-Shing and HAN Ko-Chung, A textural approach based on Gabor functions for texture edge detection in ultrasound images, INIST Ultrasound in medicine &biology, vol. 27, pp. 515534, 2001. [8] Bijay Shrestha, Dr. Charles G. OHara and Dr. Nicolas H. Younan,Image Quality Metrics, ASPRS 2005 Annual Conference Baltimore, Maryland, March 7-11, 2005 [9] LI Guoli, ZHANG Jian, WANG Qunjing, HU Cungang, DENG Na, LI Jianping, Application of Region Selective Embedded Zero tree Wavelet Coder in CT Image Compression, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology 27th Annual Conference,Shanghai, China, September 1-4, 2005 [10] Kun Wang, Jianhua Wu, Zhaoyu Pian, Li Guo, Liqun GAO, Edge Detection Algorithm for Magnetic Resonance Images Based on Multi-scale Morphology, IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation, Guangzhou, CHINA - May 30 to June 1, 2007

The above method when implemented on two images yielded the following results.

Input image MRI 1

MRI 1 Reconstructed

Input image MRI 2

MRI 2 Reconstructed
Figure 10.Illustration of the proposed Method
TABLE1. CONVENTIONAL METHOD (SPIHT ON THE WHOLE IMAGE)

Image MRI1.dcm MRI2.dcm

PSNR 29.12 30.23

MSE 2.896 2.981

CR 1.8742 1.8694

Enc Time 1.35 1.36

Dec Time 1.767 1.12

TABLE I.

PROPOSED SYSTEM

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