Patent ID: 7844705

Claim:
A system comprising: a memory device including a database having a plurality of medical images; and a server including a processor communicatively coupled to the database, wherein the server is configured to access a medical image from the plurality of medical images; to determine an optimal compression level for the medical image based at least in part on the hardware resources available at the server to compress the medical image, on the hardware resources available at a client requesting the medical image to decompress the medical image, and on at least one of a user priority level or a user performance preference; and to communicate the medical image to the client at the optimal compression level; wherein determining the optimal compression level comprises: comparing, for each of a plurality of clients, a desired medical image transmission performance metric to a predicted medical image transmission performance metric at a given compression level; computing a penalty for each client based on the comparison; and determining a desired compression level for each respective client that minimizes the sum of the penalties for the plurality of clients.