Compression helps management of hefty breast tomosynthesis data

This poster will detail the benefits of various lossless compression schemes that can be used with breast tomosynthesis images.

Compared to ordinary full-field digital mammography (FFDM), breast tomosynthesis images are huge, taking up 1 GB to 1.5 GB per study if uncompressed. This can add a significant stress on infrastructure if studies are multitudinous and read rapidly, said presenter Dr. David Clunie of CoreLab Partners.

Clunie evaluated several standard DICOM compression schemes (deflate, JPEG lossless, JPEG-LS, and JPEG 2000) with samples of tomosynthesis images from various vendors.

"Lossless compression offers approximately a fivefold reduction in size compared to uncompressed DICOM encoding, using standard DICOM lossless compression schemes like JPEG-LS or JPEG 2000," he said.