title: Joint source/channel coding for prioritized wireless transmission of multiple 3-D regions of interest in 3-D medical imaging data.
abstract: This paper presents a 3-D medical image coding method featuring two major improvements to previous work on 3-D region of interest (RoI) coding for telemedicine applications. Namely, 1) a data prioritization scheme that allows coding of multiple 3-D-RoIs; and 2) a joint/source channel coding scheme that allows prioritized transmission of multiple 3-D-RoIs over wireless channels. The method, which is based on the 3-D integer wavelet transform and embedded block coding with optimized truncation with 3-D context modeling, generates scalable and error-resilient bit streams with 3-D-RoI decoding capabilities. Coding of multiple 3-D-RoIs is attained by prioritizing the wavelet-transformed data according to a Gaussian mixed distribution, whereas error resiliency is attained by employing the error correction capabilities of rate-compatible punctured turbo codes. The robustness of the proposed method is evaluated for transmission of real 3-D medical images over Rayleigh-fading channels with a priori knowledge of the channel condition. Evaluation results show that the proposed coding method provides a superior performance compared to equal error protection and unequal error protection techniques.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. vsanchez@dcs.warwick.ac.uk
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sanchez
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods*; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed; D059015:Wireless Technology