• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1993.07a
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• pp.504-506
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• 1993

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) standard was proposed by the International Standardization Organization (ISO/SC 29/WG 10) and the CCITT SG VIII as an international standard for digital continuous-tone still image compression. The JPEG standard has been widely accepted in electronic imaging, computer graphics, and multi-media applications, however, due to the lossy character of the JPEG compression its application in the field of medical imaging has been limited. In this paper, the JPEG standard was applied to a series of head sections of magnetic resonance (MR) images (256 gray levels, $256{\times}256$ size) and its performance was investigated. For this purpose, DCT-based sequential mode of the JPEG standard was implemented using the CL550 compression chip and progressive and lossless coding was implemented by software without additional hardware. From the experiment, it appears that the compression ratio of about 10 to 20 was obtained for the MR images without noticeable distortion. It is also noted that the error signal between the reconstructed image by the JPEG and the original image was nearly random noise without causing any special-pattern-related artifact. Although the coding efficiency of the progressive and hierarchical coding is identical to that of the sequential coding in compression ratio and SNR, it has useful features In fast search of patient Image from huge image data base and in remote diagnosis through slow public communication channel.