A Method for Efficiently Previewing Domain-Bound DICOM Images in Teleradiology

Efficient data transmission is of special importance where real-time remote navigation through image archives is desirable. Previews of images can be employed for such purposes, specifically in the area of teleradiology. This paper proposes a method for preview generation, based on principal component analysis. The redundancy existing within a set of medical images is exploited by representing an input image as a linear combination of principal components. In this way, previews are compactly represented by a vector of projection coefficients, where a compression ratio of more than 1:100 can be achieved. As confirmed by results, the loss of information is comparable to standard image compression techniques.