Medical image viewing over mobile devices using 3G network

The future of healthcare delivery systems and telemedicinal applications has undergone a tremendous change due to e-health. E-health was the result of the integration of networks and telecommunications, dealing with applications of collecting, sorting and transferring medical data from distant locations for performing remote medical collaborations and diagnosis. Medical information is either in multidimensional or multi resolution form, this creates enormous amount of data. Efficient storage, retrieval, management and transmission of this voluminous data is extremely complex. The solution is to reduce this complexity is to compress the medical data so that the diagnostics capabilities are not compromised.

For medical images, only a small portion of the image might be diagnostically useful, but the cost of a wrong interpretation is high. Combination of Lossless and Lossy compression schemes with secure transmission play a key role in telemedicine applications that help in accurate diagnosis and research. In this paper, we propose a combined compression method for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine images. The method includes the compression of region of interest using lossless image compression technique i.e. Predictive coding while the remaining area of image (other than region of interest) is compressed using the near lossless image compression techniques i.e. DCT. The image later is reconstructed by merging the region of interest with non-region of interest to get the compressed image, which is then sent over a wireless network using a 3G connection for fast and errorless transmission, to be accessed by authorized users on mobile devices