State-of-the-art techniques for lossless compression of 3D medical image sets

This paper explains the basic principles of lossless two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) image coding at a high level of abstraction. It discusses also a new inter-frame technique for lossless video coding based on intra-frame prediction and inter-frame context modelling. The performance of this technique is compared to that of state-of-the-art 2D coders on CT and MRI data sets from the Visual Human Project. The results show that the inter-frame technique outperforms state-of-the-art intra-frame coders, i.e. Calic and JPEG-LS. The improvement in compression ratio is significant in the case of CT data but is rather small in the case of MRI data.