Rate-distortion and Rate-quality Performance Analysis of HEVC Compression of Medical Ultrasound Videos

The emerging video compression standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) promises to provide bitrate savings of up to 50% compared to its predecessor H.264 standard. Due to its remarkable compression performance, HEVC is expected to be extensively used for telemedicine applications. Therefore, it is important to analyse the compression performance of HEVC and its impact on the diagnostic and perceptual quality of medical videos. In this paper, medical ultrasound video sequences compressed via HEVC were subjectively assessed by medical experts and non-experts and the subjective scores obtained were then used to analyze the compression performance of HEVC in terms of acceptable diagnostic and perceptual video quality. The rate-distortion and rate-quality performance of HEVC with respect to medical ultrasound videos is presented. The bitrate and the Quantization Parameter (QP) range at which HEVC can provide acceptable diagnostic and perceptual quality for medical ultrasound videos are discussed.