The use of digital imaging in medical applications has led to significant improvements in the ability to detect and diagnose health problems. Digital imaging provides the opportunity for creative and innovative processing methods that simply would not be possible with analog systems. The price of this flexibility is the large number of bits needed to represent a digital image. Despite advances in storage and transmission technology, useful and cost-effective systems require methods for reducing the amount of data associated with digital images. The goal of image compression is to find efficient representations in order to minimize the storage capacity and/ˆ•or transmission times for a given application.