Telemedicine + OCT: toward design of optimized algorithms for high-quality compressed images

摘要

Telemedicine is an emerging technology that aims to provide clinical healthcare at a distance. Among its goals, the transfer of diagnostic images over telecommunication channels has been quite appealing to the medical community. When viewed as an adjunct to biomedical device hardware, one highly important consideration aside from the transfer rate and speed is the accuracy of the reconstructed image at the receiver end. Although optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an established imaging technique that is ripe for telemedicine, the effects of OCT data compression, which may be necessary on certain telemedicine platforms, have not received much attention in the literature. We investigate the performance and efficiency of several lossless and lossy compression techniques for OCT data and characterize their effectiveness with respect to achievable compression ratio, compression rate and preservation of image quality. We examine the effects of compression in the interferogram vs. A-scan domain as assessed with various objective and subjective metrics.