A number of applications that are not currently served by any image compression standard can use the CREW technology. CREW enables high-end applications to maintain the highest quality while applications with limited bandwidth, data storage, or display capabilities can also use the same compressed data . This device-independent representation is commonly required of modern imaging applications such as medical imaging and Web browsers. The medical image community has not used compression widely because of the unacceptably of artifacts when making medical diagnosis. However, the imperative for compression grows as medical centers use gigabytes and terrabytes of disk space per year.
Lossless compression is artifact free.
Also, high-quality lossy compression, with its higher compression rate, could become useful for archiving images. Pyramidal and progressive transmission is desired for tele-medicine or browsing through the dozens of images that are created for each patient. In addition to the lossless compression, CREW provides true lossy compression without many of the artifacts of block-based transform compressors. Lossy CREW artifacts tend to be along sharp edges where they often go undetected by the visual masking phenomena of the human visual system. However, there should be no quality penalty if there is enough bandwidth.