A novel method for the compression of angiogram video sequences is presented. The approach is based on the idea that not all of an angiogram image will de diagnostically significant, and that a greater proportion of the total bit-budget should be allocated to the image areas which are. The proposed method consists of a region-of-interest (ROI) detection stage, combined with a texture modelling stage, which are incorporated into a 3D SPIHT wavelet compression algorithm. The combined result is an approach that models the high frequency wavelet coefficients for some diagnostically unimportant regions of the image in an extremely efficient manner, allowing additional bits to be used within the ROI to improve the quality of the diagnostically significant areas. The approach is evaluated by trained cardiologists and compared favourably with the conventional 3D SPIHT algorithm.
David Gibson, Sandra I. Woolley, Michael Spann