Medical imaging technology is continuously evolving, allowing the use of images with higher spatial and temporal resolution for more accurate diagnosis. As a result, there is an exponential growth of data to be stored and transmitted. Despite the recent advances in image in video coding these algorithms are mainly targeted for multimedia applications, where lossy coding is tolerable. But, due to legal requirements only lossless compression must be used in medical imaging, in order to preserve the acquired information.
In this paper, we focus on studying the performance of several lossless image and video techniques applied to medical images, like Magnetic Resonance and Computed Tomography. Due to its volumetric characteristic, different coding approaches were investigated in order to take advantage of the inter slice redundancy. Experimental results, using state-of-the-art algorithms, show that performing inter slice prediction along various directions of the image sequence improves the compression efficiency.