Compressing data volume of left ventricular cineangiograms.

Abstract

In this paper a method of compressing data volume for left ventricular cineangiograms is proposed. This method enables digital-optical discs to store the cineangiograms with an equivalent recording density to that of HDTV VTR's while preserving the quality of the original image. The data volume of the cineangiograms is compressed by approximating function and storing its coefficients. With this method, each cineangiogram frame is first decomposed into three regions: the inner part, the inner wall, and the background (using a statistical method previously reported by the authors). Each region is then compressed by means of a difference operation and an adaptive approximation with smooth functions. Performance is tested on 20 cases using actual cineangiograms. The specifications were verified for a spatial resolution of 1000 TV lines, a dynamic range of 60 dB, an SNR of 40 dB [pp/rms], volume compression to 7% of the original volume, and 0.19 [second/frame] for decoding on a 1.7 MFLOPS computer.