Adaptive scalable wavelet difference reduction method for efficient medical image transmission

This paper presents a medical image transmission scheme based on the wavelet-based coding technique and supports the scalability and region of interest properties. The proposed scalable wavelet difference reduction scheme (SWDR), is based on the wavelet difference reduction (WDR) method, progresses adaptively to get different resolution images at any bit rate required, and supports spatial and signal to noise ratio (SNR) scalability. The method is developed for the limited bandwidth network where the image quality and data compression are most important. Simulations are performed on the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) medical images. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme SWDR gains up to 20-40% in peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) values compared to that of other scalable schemes like scalable Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SSPIHT) coding schemes to their original versions. The execution time in various resolutions is also reduced since the scheme uses run length coding instead of zero tree coding. Thus, the proposed scalable coding scheme becomes increasingly important.