WISE: A Framework for Gigapixel Whole-Slide-Image Lossless Compression
This addresses storage and maintenance challenges for medical institutions handling gigapixel WSI data, representing a novel application rather than an incremental improvement in general compression.
The paper tackles the problem of high storage costs for Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) in medical analysis by developing WISE, a lossless compression framework that reduces WSI size by 36 times on average and up to 136 times.
Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) have revolutionized medical analysis by presenting high-resolution images of the whole tissue slide. Despite avoiding the physical storage of the slides, WSIs require considerable data volume, which makes the storage and maintenance of WSI records costly and unsustainable. To this end, this work presents the first investigation of lossless compression of WSI images. Interestingly, we find that most existing compression methods fail to compress the WSI images effectively. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the failure of existing compressors is mainly due to information irregularity in WSI images. To resolve this issue, we developed a simple yet effective lossless compressor called WISE, specifically designed for WSI images. WISE employs a hierarchical encoding strategy to extract effective bits, reducing the entropy of the image and then adopting a dictionary-based method to handle the irregular frequency patterns. Through extensive experiments, we show that WISE can effectively compress the gigapixel WSI images to 36 times on average and up to 136 times.