Section: Application Domains

Medical Imaging (CT, MRI, Virtual Microscopy)

The use of medical imaging has greatly increased in recent years, especially with magnetic resonance images (MRI) and computed tomography (CT). In the medical sector, lossless compression schemes are in general used to avoid any signal degradation which could mask a pathology and hence disturb the medical diagnosis. Nethertheless, some discussions are on-going to use near-lossless coding of medical images, coupled with a detection and segmentation of region-of interest (ROIs) guided by a modeling stage of the image sensor, a precise knowledge of the medical imaging modalities and by the diagnosis and expertise of practitioners. New application domains using these new approaches of telemedecine will surely increase in the future. The second aspect deals with the legal need of biomedical images storage. The legacy rules of such archives are changing and it could be interesting to propose adaptive compression strategies, i.e to explore reversible lossy-to-lossless coding algorithms and new storage modalities which use, in a first stage, the lossless representation and continuously introduce controlled lossy degradations for the next stages of archives. Finally, it seems promising to explore new representation and coding approaches for 3D biological tissue imaging captured by 3D virtual microscopy. These fields of interest and scientific application domains commonly generate terabytes of data. Lossless schemes but also lossy approaches have to be explored and optimized, and interactive tools supporting scalable and interactive access to large-sized images such as these virtual microscopy slides need to be developed.