This document presents a new image compression scheme that combines discrete wavelet transform, SPIHT compression algorithm, and particle swarm optimization (PSO). It summarizes the discrete wavelet transform and SPIHT algorithm used for image compression. It then introduces using PSO to optimize the wavelet family in SPIHT compression, which improves visual quality metrics like PSNR compared to SPIHT alone. The proposed method is tested on 512x512 medical images in DICOM format, decompressing with different wavelet families optimized by PSO, and finds it achieves significant improvements in PSNR over existing SPIHT compression.