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

background

An introduction to watermarking techniques

Multiple Image Watermarking Applied to Health Information Management

The landscape of healthcare delivery and medical data management has significantly changed over the last years, as a result of the significant advancements in information and communication technologies. Complementary and/or alternative solutions are needed to meet the new challenges, especially regarding security of the widely distributed sensitive medical information. Digital watermarking is a recently established research area with many applications; nevertheless, the potential of this technology to contribute value-added services to medical information management systems has only recently started to be realized by the research community. The paper presents a review of research efforts in the area of medical-oriented watermarking and proposes a wavelet-based multiple watermarking scheme; this scheme aims to address critical health information management issues, including origin and data authentication, protection of sensitive data, and image archiving and retrieval. In accordance with the strict limitations applying to medical images, the scheme allows the definition of a region of interest (ROI) whose diagnostic value is protected, since the only additional information embedded therein aims at integrity control. The robustness of the method is enhanced through a form of hybrid coding, which includes repetitive embedding of BCH encoded watermarks. The experimental results on different medical imaging modalities demonstrate the efficiency and transparency of the watermarking scheme.

Secure and efficient health data management through multiple watermarking on medical images

Applications for robust watermarking is one of the major branches in digital rights management (DRM) systems and related researches. Based on existing experiences to evaluate the applicability of robust watermarking, it is generally agreed that three parameters or requirements, including the quality of watermarked contents, the survivability of extracted watermark after deliberate or unintentional attacks, and the number of bits embedded, need to be considered. However, performances relating to these three parameters conflict with each other, and the trade off must be searched for. In this paper, we take all the three requirements into consideration, and add the flexibility to meet the specific design in implementation. With the aid of genetic algorithm, we design an applicable system that would obtain the good quality, acceptable survivability, and reasonable capacity after watermarking. Simulation results present the effectiveness in practical implementation and possible application of the proposed algorithm.

The optimized copyright protection system with genetic watermarking

Telemedicine is a well-known application where enormous amount of medical data need to be securely transferred over the public network and manipulate effectively. Medical image watermarking is an appropriate method used for enhancing security and authentication of medical data, which is crucial and used for further diagnosis and reference. This project focuses on the study of medical image watermarking methods for protecting and authenticating medical data. Additionally, it covers algorithm for application of water marking technique on Region of Non Interest (RONI) of the medical image preserving Region of Interest (ROI). The medical images can be transferred securely by embedding watermarks in RONI allowing verification of the legitimate changes at the receiving end without affecting ROI. Segmentation plays an important role in medical image processing for separating the ROI from medical image. The proposed system separate the ROI from medical image by GUI based approach, which works for all types of medical images. The experimental results show the satisfactory performance of the system to authenticate the medical images preserving ROI.

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Medical Image Authentication through Watermarking Preserving ROI

In recent years, the growth of the Internet along with multimedia data delivery, have caused the misuse and even alteration of the original digital content. As a security mechanism, digital watermarking has been used to protect digital content, traditionally in copyright protection applications, and more recently digital watermarking has been used in content enhancement applications. Regardless of the application, digital watermarking schemes always cause some level of signal degradation. There are however, certain applications as in the military or medical fields, where loss of information cannot be tolerated during the reconstruction of host signals, therefore conventional watermarking schemes do not satisfy the quality requirements. In order to reconstruct signals without loss of data, reversible watermarking is employed. Recent research in reversible watermarking has focused on either, the improvement of embedding capacity or the reduction of perceptual impact of the schemes, but scarcely exploring the robustness of reversible schemes. In this survey, we provide a deep review of reversible watermarking schemes and propose a new classification outline based on the robustness point of view. Finally, some future directions for reversible watermarking research are presented and open problems in robust reversible watermarking are outlined.

methods

/pdf/a-survey-on-reversible-watermarking-for-multimedia-content-a-2gz32pbfil.pdf

An introduction to watermarking techniques

Citations

Multiple Image Watermarking Applied to Health Information Management

Secure and efficient health data management through multiple watermarking on medical images

The optimized copyright protection system with genetic watermarking

Medical Image Authentication through Watermarking Preserving ROI

A Survey on Reversible Watermarking for Multimedia Content: A Robustness Overview

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