Progressive visualization of losslessly compressed DICOM files over the Internet.

Presented in this paper is a method for progressive transfer and visualization of losslessly compressed DICOM files. The files from the same study are considered as a volumetric object, which is progressively compressed using a quadtree-based method. The textual information of the DICOM file is compressed using a predicting scheme. Decompression and visualization are implemented with Java applet technology. Users can display and interact with the object even during the data transfer. Tests have shown that an object can be recognized up to 70% faster than with the classical approaches.