Progressive Transmission of Medical Images via a Bank of Generative Adversarial Networks

The healthcare sector is currently undergoing a major transformation due to the recent advances in deep learning and artificial intelligence. Despite a significant breakthrough in medical imaging and diagnosis, there are still many open issues and undeveloped applications in the healthcare domain. In particular, transmission of a large volume of medical images proves to be a challenging and time-consuming problem, and yet no prior studies have investigated the use of deep neural networks towards this task. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and develop a deep-learning approach for the efficient transmission of medical images, with a particular interest in the progressive coding of bit-planes. We establish a connection between bit-plane synthesis and image-to-image translation and propose a two-step pipeline for progressive image transmission. First, a bank of generative adversarial networks is trained for predicting bit-planes in a top-down manner, and then prediction residuals are encoded with a tailored adaptive lossless compression algorithm. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the network bank for generating an accurate low-order bit-plane from high-order bit-planes and demonstrate an advantage of the tailored compression algorithm over conventional arithmetic coding for this special type of prediction residuals in terms of compression ratio.