Model-based 3-D encoding/2-D decoding of medicalimaging data

This chapter presents a versatile model-based coding scheme for three-dimensional medical data. The potential of the proposed system is that it copes with many of the requirements typical of the medical imaging field without sacrificing compression efficiency. Among the most interesting functionalities are progressively refinable up-to-lossless quality of the decoded information, object-based processing and the possibility to decode a single 2D image of the dataset. Furthermore, such features can be combined enabling a swift access to any two-dimensional object of any image of interest with refinable quality. The price to pay for this is an overhead in bitstream which could degrade the compression performance. Though, the possibility to focus the decoding process on a specific region of a certain 2D image allows a very efficient access to the information of interest. We believe this is an important feature for a coding system meant to be used for medical applications, which largely compensates for the eventual loss in compression that could be implied.