[Irreversible image compression in radiology. Current status]

Due to increasing amounts of data in radiology methods for image compression appear both economically and technically interesting. Irreversible image compression allows markedly higher reduction of data volume in comparison with reversible compression algorithms but is, however, accompanied by a certain amount of mathematical and visual loss of information. Various national and international radiological societies have published recommendations for the use of irreversible image compression. The degree of acceptable compression varies across modalities and regions of interest.The DICOM standard supports JPEG, which achieves compression through tiling, DCT/DWT and quantization. Although mathematical loss due to rounding up errors and reduction of high frequency information occurs this results in relatively low visual degradation.It is still unclear where to implement irreversible compression in the radiological workflow as only few studies analyzed the impact of irreversible compression on specialized image postprocessing. As long as this is within the limits recommended by the German Radiological Society irreversible image compression could be implemented directly at the imaging modality as it would comply with § 28 of the roentgen act (RöV).