JPEG2000 for DICOM

Adds on to

Medical Imaging

LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 Plug-in
Included with LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Suite
LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 compression/decompression conforms to the JPEG2000 International Standard. This new state-of-the-art ISO/ITU still image compression standard provides a fast and flexible solution for high-quality, wavelet-based compression. LEAD has committed to fully support all future parts as they are released and therefore LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 will continue to grow as the JPEG2000 standard grows.

LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 Plug-in Features

The LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 plug-in currently supports:

Native support for 8, 10-16 bit grayscale and 24 bit color lossy compression in a DICOM dataset.
Adds intrinsic DICOM JPEG2000 16-bit grayscale lossy compression support to LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging. (JPEG2000 is the only 16 bit grayscale lossy compression supported by DICOM).
Native support for 8, 10-16 bit grayscale and 24 bit color lossless compression in the DICOM dataset.
Signed 10-16 bit grayscale image data as supported by JPEG2000.
Easily convert DICOM datasets to and from JPEG2000 transfer syntax to and from any other transfer syntax included in DICOM 3 (2003 file standard) (except JPEG LS) using built in LEADTOOLS functions.
Improved network performance and image quality as compared to JPEG.
Support for four progressive display methods:

Quality Axis - The image starts blurred and the sharpness increases as more image data is received.
Resolution Axis - The image is loaded as a smaller version and the physical pixel size increases as more image data is received.
Color Axis - The image is loaded one color plane at a time. The image starts loading as a grayscale image and the color will fill in as more image data is received.
Position Axis - The image is loaded as blocks. As more image data is received, more blocks are displayed.

Multiple resolutions can be stored in the same file without duplication of the image data providing the ability to only decode and display the size of image required by the application.
Error checking and robustness allows the transmission of JPEG2000 encoded files over a noisy medium. If an error occurs in the decoding, the image will still be displayed.
Control over the final size of the file without hit and miss quality factor adjustments.

JPEG2000 Overview

JPEG2000 is a new image-encoding standard that provides a feature set vital to the medical imaging community. JPEG2000 provides high compression with image quality superior to all existing standard encoding techniques. This high compression and quality performance is due to the adaptation of wavelet transforms. Wavelet transforms are mathematical formulas that represent complex structures in the image, thereby compressing an extremely large amount of image data into a relatively small amount of compressed data. This compression technique allows applications to save compressed images with higher compression ratios and better image quality as compared to any other software currently in production.

JPEG2000 is a wavelet-based compression stored in a hierarchical format which can contain several stored resolutions of the image in the same file without duplication of data. For that reason, a JPEG2000 compressed image can then be sent to a device in the resolution that best fits without additional storage overhead. LEAD Technologies has used its more than twelve years in the imaging and compression developer toolkit marketplace to formulate a JPEG2000 product that offers DICOM developers the best JPEG2000 implementation available.

JPEG2000 Key Benefits

Greater compression while maintaining better quality than traditional JPEG. This helps reduce network bandwidth and storage requirements.
JPEG2000 is the only 16-bit grayscale lossy compression supported in DICOM.
Maintain diagnostic image quality by using JPEG2000.
Multiple resolutions in JPEG2000 means that only the data needed to view the image for a particular device or zoom need be sent over the network and loaded into memory.
Progressive display provides feedback to the user while the image is loading.
Region of interest encoding and decoding. Compress specified areas of the image more or received more detail for an area of interest on the client maximizing network efficiency while providing the user the detail that he or she demands.
JPEG2000 supports 24 bit color, and 8, 12 and 16 bit grayscale image data.
LEADTOOLS supports JPEG2000 on multiple platforms including Windows, Pocket PC and an Internet Explorer plug-in.

The LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 plug-in can be added on to any LEADTOOLS toolkit that includes raster image format support.