Efficient visualization of encoded Fourier transform infrared microscopic data of osteoporotic bone

摘要

Fourier Transform Infrared Microspectroscopy of bone slices has become a major research tool to analyze the chemical constitution of calcified structures. Qualitative as well quantitative measures of bone components using this technique have shown to be useful in the characterization of normal bone in both animal and human specimens. Furthermore, the technique can be used to characterize bone diseases like osteoporosis and the ejects of different chemical constitutions on bone structures. However, the ever-increasing number of Fourier Transform Infrared Microspectroscopy studies yields amounts of data that are becoming unmanageable in terms of size for the purpose of storage. We address this problem by applying two different lossless coding techniques to the images generated by the studies. Compression ratios as high as 100:1 are obtained by coding lower bit levels of the image while retaining the information that is used by the specialists.