Multiple Image Watermarking Applied to Health Information Management

Abstract

Information technology advances have brought forth new challenges in healthcare information management, due to the vast amount of medical data that needs to be efficiently stored, retrieved, and distributed, and the increased security threats that explicitly have to be addressed. The paper discusses the perspectives of digital watermarking in a range of medical data management and distribution issues, and proposes a complementary and/or alternative tool that simultaneously addresses medical data protection, archiving, and retrieval, as well as source and data authentication. The scheme imperceptibly embeds in medical images multiple watermarks conveying patient's personal and examination data, keywords for information retrieval, the physician's digital signature for authentication, and a reference message for data integrity control. Experimental results indicate the efficiency and transparency of the scheme, which conforms to the strict requirements that apply to regions of diagnostic significance.

A Review of Medical Image Watermarking Requirements for Teleradiology

“…Additionally, Coatrieux et al [104] discussed two limitations of reversible watermarking: (1) It imposes the watermark removal before the diagnosis, and (2) it assumes a secured environment because, once the watermark is removed, the image is not protected anymore like in cryptography. All these suggest that a combination of suitable type of watermarking schemes, where the concept of multiple watermarking stems from, can be developed in order to address the rising security problems of medical images in teleradiology [77,[105][106][107]. Studies also show that incorporation of asymmetric encryption and lossless compression can help attain additional confidentiality, nonrepudiation property, high embedding capacity [15,103,108].…”

“…Watermarking allows using DS or perceptual hashing for appropriate applications [78,105,109,110]. Watermarking systems have room for employing encryption for the additional confidentiality of metadata (e.g., in generating watermark).…”

Authentication and Data Hiding Using a Hybrid ROI-Based Watermarking Scheme for DICOM Images

“…6 They then improved that technique gradually to increase its robustness and security. [7][8][9][10] The technique takes the advantages of dyadic rational form of Haar wavelet coefficients and the decreased eye sensitivity to noise in highresolution bands. The scheme embeds a robust watermark containing the physician's digital signature for source authentication and a caption watermark including patient's personal data, health history, diagnosis reports, etc.…”

“…4 The first class groups methods that embed information within region of noninterest (RONI) in order not to compromise with the diagnoses capabilities. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] The second group of algorithms corresponds to reversible watermarking. Once the embedded content is read, the watermark can be removed from the image allowing retrieval of the original image.…”

Providing Integrity, Authenticity, and Confidentiality for Header and Pixel Data of DICOM Images

“…Irreversible and reversible watermarking techniques have been used for embedding the different watermarks in the spatial domain and frequency domains. However, irreversible watermarking is not acceptable in the medical field since the distortion caused to the watermarked image involves noninvertible operations such as bit replacement, truncation, or quantization [8,9]. Reversible watermarking, on the other hand, allows the medical image to be restored to its original pixel values, however, it introduces computational overhead to restore the watermarked image back to its original state [10][11][12][13][14].…”