Within the expanding paradigm of medical imaging and wireless communications there is increasing demand for transmitting diagnostic medical imagery over error-prone wireless communication channels such as those encountered in cellular phone technology. Medical images must be compressed with minimal file size to minimize transmission time and robustly coded to withstand these wireless environments. It has been reinforced through extensive research that the most crucial regions of medical images must not be degraded and compressed by a lossless or near lossless algorithm. This type of area is called the Region of Interest (ROI). Conversely, the Region of Backgrounds (ROB) may be compressed with some loss of information to achieve a higher compression level. This type of hybrid coding scheme is most useful for wireless communication where the ‘bit-budget’ is devoted to the ROI. This paper also develops a way for this system to operate externally to the Joint Picture Experts Group (J...