Medical images must be compressed before transmission due to bandwidth and storage limitations. The set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) algorithm is an efficient method for lossy and loss-less coding of medical images. We propose some modifications to the SPIHT algorithm. It is based on the idea of the insignificant correlation of wavelet coefficients among medium- and high-frequency subbands. In this scheme, insignificant wavelet coefficients that correspond to the same spatial location in the medium subbands can be used to reduce the redundancy by a combined function proposed in associated with the modified SPIHT. In high-frequency subbands, the modified SPIHT proposes a dictator to reduce the interband redundancy. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique improves the quality of the reconstructed medical image in terms of both the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the perceptual results over JPEG2000 and the original SPIHT at the same bit rate.
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