National Library of Medicine, Office of Acquisitions Management, Building 38A, Room B1N17, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20894

R -- PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT SERVICES SOL RFQ NLM 99-118/RTR DUE 082099 POC Ramona T. Rivers, Purchasing Agent, NLM (301) 496-6127 Fax (301) 402-8169 E-MAIL: RFQ NLM 99-118, ramona_rivers@ccmail.nlm.nih.gov. It is the intent of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to negotiate on a sole source basis with Texas Tech University, Office of Research Services, 203 Holden Lane Lubbock, TX 79409 for professional services to support ongoing research in the compression of the Visible Human images over a 10-month period. The NLM's Visible Human (VH) cryosectioned 24 bit/pixel color images are highly data intensive and challenge both transmission and storage. Texas Tech University has knowledge in the area of image processing applied to biomedical images, having organized IEEE symposia on computer-based medical systems, SPIE medical images conferences, SPIE conferences on intelligent robots and computer vision, and joint university-industry workshops on these and related topics. The objective is to develop a system that can provide the best means of storing this image set without losing original data, and providing access to it via the Internet at a lossiness controlled by the requester (user). This strategy, therefore, is based on a user-centered philosophy, not the conventional approach of compressing images by multiple techniques, and allowing experts to examine the expanded images for subjective quality. This task shall require an automated segmentation algorithm to discard background and retain only the anatomic regions of interest and fiduciary marks in the VH slices. This algorithm shall be coded as an executable module in C or C++, and shall be applied to the VH image set (male and female). The segmented images shall be compressed losslessly by an adaptive arithmetic coding technique for color image compression developed at Texas Tech University. The effective CR yielded by segmentation and AAC shall exceed a CR of 8. The compressed slices shall be stored in an index based file so that any number of slices or regions can be located on an icon showing 3-D Visible Human male or female body for fast retrieval of data. A Java applet shall be designed, developed and implemented to enable rapid selection and downloading of images over the Internet, graphical selection of the anatomic region of interest, and previewing. This software shall enable the user to log on to the server holding the VH images, and interactively choose the slices to be downloaded, and enable the user to choose among four quality options corresponding to four levels of lossy compression following the EZW or other wavelet-based method. A Java application shall be designed, developed and implemented for opening the received file, choosing a compressed file, expanding and automatically displaying it, and saving the image as a raw file to be opened later using commercial applications for editing or file format changes. This application shall be designed to be transmitted to the user for compressing and storing the VH data in the user's machine. All source code and executable code shall be delivered under this task, as well as a detailed report describing the technical approach, method of statistical analysis and justification for the choices made for the losslessly and lossy compression techniques. Firms interested in responding to this notice must submit as part of their response clear and convincing documentation of their ability to meet the Government's requirements. If a response indicates that a competitive acquisition would be more advantageous to the Government, a formal solicitation may be issued.***** Posted 08/05/99 (W-SN363812). (0217)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0106 19990809\R-0013.SOL)