Methods and systems for remotely visualizing images

A method for remotely visualizing an image on a client includes the steps of rendering a 2D image from image data on a server, applying a 2D wavelet transform to the 2D image on the server to generate a plurality of sub-bands, identifying code blocks of the sub-bands that correspond to a region of interest in the 2D image on the server, compressing a number of bit planes of each code block using one of a plurality of coding techniques on the server based on the number of bit planes to generate compressed codes, sending the compressed codes from the server to the client, and visualizing a new 2D image on the client using the received compressed codes.