Section Overview

An essential component of mobile e-Health systems is the effective compression and communication of biosignals, images, and digital videos. The clinical requirements of e-Health systems imply the use of high-rate, high-quality, high SNR compression systems. Thus, lossless and near-lossless performance is usually desired. It is important to note, however that significantly better compression can be achieved using perceptually-lossless and diagnostically-lossless compression criteria. With the acceptance of JPEG2000 and the recent consideration of MPEG-2 by the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) committee, it is clear that lossy compression techniques will become an essential component of every mobile e-Health system. There is a variety of biomedical signals that need to be compressed and transmitted. This section reflects this variety. It begins with a discussion of biosignals and compression, the description of a variety of algorithms for a resilient ECG coding system for telecardiology, followed by a discussion of the use of the JPEG2000 image compression standard, the compression of volumetric data, and an overview of digital video compression.