ABSTRACT
MRI Medical imaging produces human body pictures in digital form. Since these imaging
modalities produce incredible amounts of data, therefore, compression is necessary for storage
and communication purposes. Many current compression schemes provide a very high
compression rate but with considerable loss of quality. On the other hand, in some areas in
medicine, it may be sufficient to maintain high image quality only in the region of interest,
i.e., in diagnostically important regions. This paper discusses a hybrid technique for lossless
compression in the region of interest, with high-rate lossy compression in other regions. Such
techniques are of great interest in telemedicine or medical imaging applications with large
storage requirements. In doing so, we are able to achieve a relatively high compression ratio
for the MRI images, while preserving the lossless contents of important regions. An
application to MRI Brain imaging with the special interest on tumor are presented.