Multiplex fluorescence in situ hybridization (M-FISH) is a recently developed 
technology that enables multi-color chromosome karyotyping for molecular 
cytogenetic analysis. Each M-FISH image set consists of a number of aligned 
images of the same chromosome specimen captured at different optical wavelength. 
This paper presents embedded M-FISH image coding (EMIC), where the foreground 
objects/chromosomes and the background objects/images are coded separately. We 
first apply critically sampled integer wavelet transforms to both the foreground 
and the background. We then use object-based bit-plane coding to compress each 
object and generate separate embedded bitstreams that allow continuous 
lossy-to-lossless compression of the foreground and the background. For 
efficient arithmetic coding of bit planes, we propose a method of designing an 
optimal context model that specifically exploits the statistical characteristics 
of M-FISH images in the wavelet domain. Our experiments show that EMIC achieves 
nearly twice as much compression as Lempel-Ziv-Welch coding. EMIC also performs 
much better than JPEG-LS and JPEG-2000 for lossless coding. The lossy 
performance of EMIC is significantly better than that of coding each M-FISH 
image with JPEG-2000.