Issues in MPEG compression of ultrasound sequences
James E. Cabral, Frederic Noraz, Yongmin Kim · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
As part of ongoing research on hardware and software technologies for telemedicine, we have explored compression algorithms for ultrasound. Efficient compression is essential to PACS and telemedicine systems supporting ultrasound video sequences due to limited system resources such as archival storage and bus and network bandwidths. We have studied MPEG compression of ultrasound sequences and the impact of varying encoding parameters such as quantization scale on B and BC mode sequences. Our results indicate that standard interframe MPEG coding is not optimal for all echocardiographic sequences. Adjustment of MPEG quantization and sequencing parameters can provide improvements in compression ratio and/or image quality. Three areas for improvement in MPEG compression of ultrasound sequences have been identified and methods are suggested by which these issues may be addressed.