Inter-Modal Selective 3D Coding of PET-CT Datasets

In this work we introduce a new selective coding approach suitable for co-registered multi-modal medical images and we apply it to large PET-CT volumes. Salience information guiding a space variant reconstruction quality of the anatomical volume (CT) is generated through an automatic analysis of the functional volume (PET). This allows a versatile multiple volume-of-interest coding with arbitrary 3D-shape and scaling-factors and without the need of side information to be transmitted. The proposed solutions are suitable for critical applications where high and optimized compression ratio, minimization of human intervention and full diagnostic quality preservation are all required.