The invention publishes a medical image ROI 
compression method based on a lifting 
wavelet and a PCNN, which comprises the following steps of: circling a 
region of interest by a doctor, and separating the 
region of interest from a region of no interest by a difference image method; adopting 
lossless compression in the 
region of interest, constructing compactly supported 
biorthogonal wavelet transformation through a 
lifting scheme, and then carrying out Huffman encoding; adopting 
lossy compression in the region of no interest, segmenting gray-value pixel approximate points through the PCNN, carrying out ignition operation, and then carrying out run-length encoding; and finally carrying out inverse transformation restoration, merging the region of interest and the region of no interest, and eliminating a boundary discontinuity problem through linear interpolation. Experimental results prove that the region of interest can be flexibly selected and controlled by the 
compression method, the used information for doctor diagnosis can be completely reserved, and the 
compression ratio is higher. Meanwhile, the computation for an ROI 
mask and the computation and the encoding for a 
wavelet coefficient difference value are omitted, the compression and decompression time and the 
algorithm complexity are reduced, and the 
image processing and transmitting efficiency is improved.