CompaCT: Fractal-Based Heuristic Pixel Segmentation for Lossless
  Compression of High-Color DICOM Medical Images
Taaha Khan
Medical image compression is a widely studied field of data processing due to
its prevalence in modern digital databases. This domain requires a high color
depth of 12 bits per pixel component for accurate analysis by physicians,
primarily in the DICOM format. Standard raster-based compression of images via
filtering is well-known; however, it remains suboptimal in the medical domain
due to non-specialized implementations. This study proposes a lossless medical
image compression algorithm, CompaCT, that aims to target spatial features and
patterns of pixel concentration for dynamically enhanced data processing. The
algorithm employs fractal pixel traversal coupled with a novel approach of
segmentation and meshing between pixel blocks for preprocessing. Furthermore,
delta and entropy coding are applied to this concept for a complete compression
pipeline. The proposal demonstrates that the data compression achieved via
fractal segmentation preprocessing yields enhanced image compression results
while remaining lossless in its reconstruction accuracy. CompaCT is evaluated
in its compression ratios on 3954 high-color CT scans against the efficiency of
industry-standard compression techniques (i.e., JPEG2000, RLE, ZIP, PNG). Its
reconstruction performance is assessed with error metrics to verify lossless
image recovery after decompression. The results demonstrate that CompaCT can
compress and losslessly reconstruct medical images, being 37% more
space-efficient than industry-standard compression systems.