OCTOBER 24--Pegasus Imaging Corporation (Tampa, FL;www.pegasusimaging.com) recently doubled the decompression and display speed of its 8-bit, gray lossless JPEG. This development impacts the medical industry because it is used by a high percentage of medical imaging technology vendors, particularly for ultrasound and cardiology. "Historically, our lossless JPEG image compression and decompression have been the fastest available," says Will Clonts, medical business development manager at Pegasus Imaging. "This makes the improvement even more significant."
Doctors using the software will now be able to view medical images faster than ever before. The increase is up to two times the speed of the previous PICTools Medical version on a Pentium IV processor and up to 1.4 times on a Pentium III processor.
This lossless JPEG decompression can be found in Pegasus Imaging's PICTools Medical Software Development Kit (SDK). Programmers use the SDK to integrate image compression optimized for speed and quality into medical imaging software. This SDK has received an FDA 510(k) number and contains low-level C libraries that provide highly optimized medical image compression including lossless JPEG, lossy JPEG, and wavelet. JPEG 2000 compression is also available as an addon.
PICTools Medical is available on Windows, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. This speed improvement was made to the Windows and Linux versions, and the Solaris speed improvement will be available soon.
