Evaluating Lossy and Lossless Compression for DICOM Medical Files

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a widely used standard for handling, storing, and sharing medical images. However, the large file sizes associated with DICOM data pose challenges for storage and data transfer. Data reduction helps mitigate these challenges by reducing the size of the data while maintaining its integrity. This paper examines various compression methods to reduce the size of DICOM files. We evaluate 5 lossless and 4 lossy compressors on DICOM data. This study aims to compare and evaluate the performance of these compressors. By analyzing each compressor’s compression efficiency and produced image fidelity, this research seeks to determine the most effective compression strategy. Results show SZ3 is able to achieve 183.74× with error bound 1e<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−7</sup> and ZFP received compression bandwidth 303.82 MB/s while error bound is 1e<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−7</sup>.