Microsoft on Tuesday announced that the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) is considering standardization of the company’s HD Photo file format. Tentatively titled “JPEG XR,” HD Photo was introduced with the release of Windows Vista.
Medical Opportunity?While not as glamarous as a fashy new gizmo the file format could provide an opportunity to obtain very high resolution photos with better color reproduction with higher compresion and imaged and archived faster. All of this will benefit our ability to image from endoscopic surgery and help propel the OR to a wireless environment.
You can read about operating room surgical image archiving and what I have been doing with HD video here and about recording video in HD from the OR here
HD Photo - once known as Windows Media Photo is a new file format for digital photography that Microsoft claims offers better image fidelity, higher image compression efficiency more flexible editing features. It supports both lossy and lossless compression. Microsoft claims that HD Photo offers image comparable to JPEG-2000 with less performance and memory drain, and that it can deliver better quality images than JPEG at less than half the file size. They also claim”
The HD Photo image-coding technology, incubated in Microsoft Research and developed by Microsoft’s Core Media Processing team, offers a host of new features and benefits focusing on the current and emerging needs of digital photography. The technology, which shipped in Windows Vista®, is a new file format for end-to-end digital photography that offers better image fidelity, higher image-compression efficiency and flexible editing features benefiting today’s and tomorrow’s digital-imaging applications. This next-generation digital image format unlocks new potential for digital photography capture, printing and display devices as well as applications and services.
and further ” “Higher compression efficiency offers faster wireless uploads for longer battery life and an enhanced dynamic range that will help improve photographs taken in low-light conditions with a mobile phone or digital camera that does not offer sufficient flash assistance.”
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[…] YouTube Contact the Webmaster Link to Article windows vista New HD Photo Compression System Could Help Surgical Archiving » Posted at docinthemachine on Friday, August 03, 2007 Microsoft on Tuesday announced that the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) is considering standardization of the company’s HD Photo file format. Tentatively titled “JPEG XR,” HD Photo was introduced with the release of Windows Vista. Medical … photography. The technology, which shipped in Windows Vista, is a new file format for end-to-end digital View Original Article » […]
As near as I can tell, “HD Photo” and “HD Video” are two very different things (other than sharing “HD” in their name). I do wonder about the potential for HD Photo use in the medical community since the DICOM standard has JPEG2000 at its core already. Do you envision HD Photo supplementing or replacing JPEG2000 in DICOM?
Peter- you are 100% correct there is nothing HD photo and video have in common except the letters “HD” (a bit of microsoft marketing). I did not mean to imply there was any connection. The OR archiving systems are fairly primitive today using low res BMP, or sometimes a decent TIFF or JPEG (usually lower res). I do not see HD photo replacing JPEG2000 in DICOM necessarily. The OR archival systems while sometimes DICOM compliant ususally do not use it. They are simply local recorders attached to the cmera that burn a disk. I have never seen an OR make use of the DICOM functionality sending the images remotely although that is a feature of some. My point of the post is that if a system can be designed that can use a compression algorithm that yields very high compression and quality on the fly it could enable wireless systems for us.
Ah! Thanks for the clarification, Dr. Palter. My knowledge of compressed video standards is somewhat slim, but I have run across references to Motion JPEG2000 being used for remote security cameras and the like. (That may or may not have a place in the OR.) And HD Photo may hold promise in the sorts of embedded systems you are talking about. I’m coming at the imaging standards from a cultural heritage preservation point-of-view, and I’m still waiting to see the studies and the implementations that would allow for a true comparison with other standards that are out there.
[…] As part of my posts on my research on high definition surgery (and its recording) in the operating room, I posted on the limitations of still photo archiving in the operating room and potential future advances from new compression systems. […]
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