Variable-rate, lossy, tree-structured codes and digital radiography

The author surveys binary tree-structured methods for clustering as they apply to predictive, pruned, tree-structured vector quantization (predictive PTSVQ). Much of the material concerns applications of PTSVQ to the lossy coding of digital medical images, especially CT and MR chest scans. There is a brief introduction to the asymptotic properties of the algorithms and to an attempt to understand variability and covariability of amino acids in the V3 loop region of HIV.