Abstract: In order to satisfy the need of diagnoses, based on the characteristic of medical images that a sequence of frames are formed in one body inspection, a new strategy for medical images compression is proposed. The three-dimension wavelet is adopted and the planar zerotree is extended to the three-dimensional zerotree. By making use of the three-dimensional zerotree structure, a simple method for ROI mask generation is put forward. Medical images are compressed by three-dimensional embedded coding with the compression of regions of interest. Simulation results have shown that it can efficiently improve the compression ratio without affecting the diagnoses.

Key words: 3DWT, ROI, three-dimensional zerotree, EZW, medical image compression