Keynote

“Innovations in Biomedical Waveform Coding: An Emerging Standard and Its Applications”
Dr. Jonathan Pfaff
Fraunhofer HHI

Abstract:
Due to the rise of personalized medicine and personalized diagnostic devices, one currently faces a large growth in the amount of biomedical waveform data such as EEG, ECG, or PPG signals. Consequently, in a recent joint effort with medical experts, the international standardization organizations VCEG and MPEG Audio are developing the standard T.261 for the compression of biomedical and general waveform data. The resulting codec can be operated both in a lossless and in a lossy scenario and is targeted to be broadly applicable within the healthcare space. In this keynote, an overview of the main functionalities and core coding tools of T.261 will be presented. This includes, for example, the handling of multiple channels, intra- and inter-channel prediction methods, entropy constraint quantization of transform coefficients coupled with coefficient-wise adaptive prediction, and encoder control with maximum error bounds. Finally, experimental evaluations of the compression performance of T.261 will be presented. Results will be shown both with respect to mean-squared-error-based distortion measures and with respect to the behavior of automated diagnostic classification algorithms on compressed waveforms.