VLSI chip solution for lossless medical imagery compression
Jack Venbrux, Pen-Shu Yeh, Gregory C. Zweigle, John F. Vesel · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
This paper describes two VLSI implementations that provide an effective solution to compressing medical image data in real time. The implementations employ a lossless data compression algorithm, known as the Rice algorithm. The first chip set was fabricated in 1991. The encoder can compress at 20 Msamples/sec and the decoder decompresses at the rate of 10 Msamples/sec. The chip set is available commercially. The second VLSI chip development is a recently fabricated encoder that provides improvements for coding low entropy data and incorporates features that simplify system integration. A new decoder is scheduled to be designed and fabricated in 1994. The performance of the compression chips on a suite of medical images has been simulated. The image suite includes CT, MR, angiographic images, and nuclear images. In general, the single-pass Rice algorithm compression performance exceeds that of two-pass, lossless, Huffman-based JPEG. The overall compression performance of the Rice algorithm implementations exceeds that of all algorithms tested including arithmetic coding, UNIX compress, UNIX pack, and gzip.