Metodi di valutazione della qualità di immagini compresse in telemedicina

Picture Archive Communication Systems (PACS) are of growing interest in the field of medical imaging. Compression techniques need to be used in order to both reduce archive requirements and to limit the bandwidth in communication networks. The present work deals with the problem related to the evaluation of the diagnostic quality of the compressed images. Objective criteria, like computing the reconstruction errors, are considered and complemented with subjective evaluation methods, based on statistical decision theory. Receiver Operating Characteristic curves, computed from the observations by experts, allow to complete the diagnostic quality concept, also taking into account the physician's skills and experience.