Performance comparison of compression algorithms for archiving segmented volumetric binary medical data.

Archiving result of a segmentation task allows the representation of the segmented volume at a later time. The segmented volume can be stored in a binary format, which can be restored by a simple combination of the original data with this binary information. Since, the sizes of the segmented binary data have high memory requirements; a lossless compression method should be employed for efficient archiving. Thus, this study examines different approaches for compression and their suitability for restoring binary segmentation results. To evaluate the compressive properties, multiple test cases with diverse spatial structures and acquired with different modalities from clinical practice have been used. The results show that best performance is achieved with JBIG2 method both in terms of compression ratio and processing time.