New approach to inter-slice coding of magnetic resonance images
Nader Mohsenian, Aria Nosratinia, Bede Liu, M.T. Orchard · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
In this paper we present an inter-slice coding scheme for magnetic resonance (MR) image sequences which is based on a triangular matching technique. This scheme provides a powerful tool for MR image sequence compression since there exists a great deal of deformation between contiguous slices of 3D MR data. The proposed inter-slice coding scheme takes advantage of triangular deformation to remove redundancies in the third dimension. A residual image is formed by estimating and compensating for the triangular deformation in the previous slice, and subtracting this from the original slice. The DCT is used to de-correlate the residue signal. DC components are encoded losslessly using DPCM and Huffman codes. Different banks of entropy-constraint scalar quantizers are designed for the AC components. Each AC coefficient is encoded using an appropriate scalar codebook subject to a bit-allocation procedure. The new inter-slice coding scheme is tested on an MR heart sequence. It shows superior results over intra-slice and other inter-slice schemes. The compressed images displayed on the monitor are imperceptible from the original at our lowest bit-rates.