High compression of nuclear medicine dynamic studies

As data compression plays now an important role in the development of medical PACS, a technique has been developed for medical image sequences storage and transmission in order to obtain very high compression ratio: in dynamic nuclear medicine studies it can achieve a compression ratio as high as 100:1 without significant degradation. The implemented technique combines two methods which multiply their effects. In a first step, a principal component analysis (PCA) of the image series is performed. It extracts a limited number of principal components and their associated images. For data compression it is not necessary to perform an oblique factor analysis to estimate the so-called 'physiological functions' and their spatial distributions as in factor analysis of dynamic structures (FADS). In a second step, the principal images are compressed by means of a transform coding procedure: an adaptive block-quantization technique using the 2D discrete cosine transform (DCT) is implemented, followed by a statistical quantization method to encode the DCT coefficients. To reconstruct the principal images, an inverse DCT is applied. Then the original series is computed from the reconstructed images combined with the principal components which have been stored without any modification. The reconstructed series is compared to the original series, as well as the time activity curves generated on different regions of interest (ROI) and the factor estimates obtained using FADS performed on the two series. Method and evaluation are illustrated on an example of first pass radionuclide angiocardiography.