  Efficient lossless coding of medical volume data with temporal axis can be
achieved by motion compensated wavelet lifting. As side benefit, a scalable bit
stream is generated, which allows for displaying the data at different
resolution layers, highly demanded for telemedicine applications. Additionally,
the similarity of the temporal base layer to the input sequence is preserved by
the use of motion compensated temporal filtering. However, for medical
sequences the overall rate is increased due to the specific noise
characteristics of the data. The use of denoising filters inside the lifting
structure can improve the compression efficiency significantly without
endangering the property of perfect reconstruction. However, the design of an
optimum filter is a crucial task. In this paper, we present a new method for
selecting the optimal filter strength for a certain denoising filter in a
rate-distortion sense. This allows to minimize the required rate based on a
single input parameter for the encoder to control the requested distortion of
the temporal base layer.
