A novel resolution independent gradient edge predictor for lossless compression of medical image sequences

Digital visualization of human body in terms of medical images with high resolution and bit depth generates tremendous amount of data. In the field of medical diagnosis, lossless compression technique is preferred that facilitates efficient archiving and transmission of medical images avoiding false diagnosis. Among various approaches to lossless compression of medical images, predictive coding techniques have high coding efficiency and low complexity. Gradient Edge Detector (GED) used in predictive coding is based on threshold value for prediction and choice of threshold is very important for efficient prediction. However, no specific method is adopted in the literature for threshold value selection. This paper presents an efficient prediction solution targeted at lossless compression of 8 bits and higher bit depth volumetric medical images up to 16 bits. Novelty of the proposed technique is developing Resolution Independent Gradient Edge Predictor (RIGED) algorithm to support 8- and 16-bit depth medical images. Percentage improvement of the proposed model is 30.39% over state-of-the-art Median Edge Detector (MED) and 0.92% over Gradient Adaptive Predictor (GAP) in terms of entropy for medical image dataset of different modalities having different resolutions and bit depths.