1. A method for displaying a sequence of fluoroscopic images of a patient, comprising: defining, within the image area of a digital image receiver, in response to one or more viewer instructions, a region of interest and a background region disposed outside the defined region of interest; obtaining a succession of fluoroscopic images at a digital image receiver and, for image pixels within each of the succession of images: (i) encoding and transmitting background region pixels to a display apparatus using a lossy encoding, with transmission at a first refresh rate, wherein more than one type of lossy encoding is used for the background region pixels, according to distance from the region of interest; and (ii) transmitting region of interest pixels to the display apparatus using a second encoding, with transmission at a second refresh rate that is higher than the first refresh rate; and displaying the succession of fluoroscopic images on the display apparatus.