Compression and reconstruction of MRI images using 2D DCT.

In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the original data are sampled in the spatial frequency domain. The sampled data thus constitute a set of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) coefficients. The image is usually reconstructed by taking inverse DFT. The image data may then be compressed using the discrete cosine transform (DCT). We present here a method of treating the data that combines two procedures, image reconstruction and data compression. This method may be particularly useful in medical picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) where both image reconstruction and compression are important issues.