Internet transmission of DICOM images with effective low bandwidth utilization

Progressive transmission of medical images through Internet has emerged as a promising protocol for teleradiology applications. The major issue that arises in teleradiology is the difficulty of transmitting large volume of medical data with relatively low bandwidth. Recent image compression techniques have increased the viability by reducing the bandwidth requirement and allowing cost-effective delivery of medical images for primary diagnosis. This paper highlights a wavelet based set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) coder for progressive transmission of DICOM images. The header of the DICOM image is first transmitted followed by the compressed image data and then at the receiving end, images are reconstructed from low quality to high (or perfect) quality. The performance of the coder is evaluated using two image quality assessment criteria, namely, mean squared error (MSE) and mean structural similarity (MSSIM) index. The results prove that our method provides diagnostically useful information as rapidly as possible utilizing minimum bandwidth than variants of JPEG as reported in literature.