The rapid increase in medical and biomedical image acquisition rates has opened up new avenues for image analysis, but has also introduced formidable challenges. This is evident, for example, in selective plane illumination microscopy where acquisition rates of about 1-4 GB/s sustained over several days have redefined the scale of I/O bandwidth required by image analysis tools. Although the effective bandwidth could, principally, be increased by lossy-to-lossless data compression, this is of limited value in practice due to the high computational demand of current schemes such as JPEG2000 that reach compression throughput of one order of magnitude below that of image acquisition. Here we present a novel lossy-to-lossless data compression scheme with a compression throughput well above 4 GB/s and compression rates and rate-distortion curves competitive with those achieved by JPEG2000 and JP3D.
