An Efficient Lossless Medical Data Compression using LZW compression for Optimal Cloud Data Storage

Abstract

In the current digital era, the medical records of the patients are all processed and stored
digitally. With the increasing population, the storage space requirements for the medical data
are increasing exponentially. The medical and pharmaceutical companies spend a large
amount of money on the storage spaces to store the patient records. Conventional lossy
storage techniques cannot be used to store medical data as the data needs to recovered
completely while decompression. This paper presents a novel lossless data compression
technique which is fast and efficient to store the medical data. LZW compression is a
dictionary based lossless compression technique which utilizes the redundancy and repetition
in the data to compress it. The compressed data can fully be recovered very quickly whenever
needed. The proposed method is compared with other lossless compression techniques. The
proposed method is implemented using python and HADOOP is used to store the compressed
data.