Performance evaluation of a perceptually lossless medical image coder

How to deliver clinically critical information in a 'smaller package'? This paper evaluates a recently proposed perceptually lossless medical image coder (PLMIC) based on the JPEG2000 coding framework. A performance comparison is made between the PLMIC and two benchmark coders LOCO-I and near lossless LOCO-I at two levels in terms of compression ratio and picture fidelity. Subjective assessment in this instance has been carried out with 31 medical experts. The results have shown that the PLMIC delivers significantly higher compression ratio performance than that of the state-of-the-art JPEG-LS LOCO-I lossless algorithm without any visible degradation in image quality or clinical information.