Lossy Compression Should Also Be Used in Functional MRI Research

The amount of functional MRI (fMRI) data processed in research is growing, yet no practice or protocol to store them in a lossy format exists. Many researchers are struggling with limited storage space, and speed of common processing tools are often bound by storage speed. In this work, we present a lossy compression framework for fMRI data with user adjustable trade-off between compression ratio and root mean squared error (RMSE). Our goal is to demonstrate the usability of on-the-fly lossy compression for fMRI data. On one hand, the storage footprint and processing speeds both benefit from higher data compression rates achieved with lossy compression. On the other hand, data quality for functional analysis remains effectively the same. With this short demonstration we encourage the research community to develop a lossy data standard for fMRI data.