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Proceedings ArticleDOI

Embedding patients confidential data in ECG signal for healthcare information systems

11 Nov 2010-Vol. 2010, pp 3891-3894
TL;DR: A new steganography technique is proposed that helps embed confidential information of patients into specific locations (called special range numbers) of digital ECG host signal that will cause minimal distortion to ECG, and at the same time, any secret information embedded is completely extractable.
Abstract: In Wireless tele-cardiology applications, ECG signal is widely used to monitor cardiac activities of patients Accordingly, in most e-health applications, ECG signals need to be combined with patient confidential information Data hiding and watermarking techniques can play a crucial role in ECG wireless tele-monitoring systems by combining the confidential information with the ECG signal since digital ECG data is huge enough to act as host to carry tiny amount of additional secret data In this paper, a new steganography technique is proposed that helps embed confidential information of patients into specific locations (called special range numbers) of digital ECG host signal that will cause minimal distortion to ECG, and at the same time, any secret information embedded is completely extractable We show that there are 21475 × 109 possible special range numbers making it extremely difficult for intruders to identify locations of secret bits Experiments show that percentage residual difference (PRD) of watermarked ECGs can be as low as 00247% and 00678% for normal and abnormal ECG segments (taken from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database) respectively
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used quantization based digital watermark encryption technology on the Electrocardiogram (ECG) to protect patient rights and information, which is the most widely used technology in the field of copyright and biological information protection.
Abstract: Watermarking is the most widely used technology in the field of copyright and biological information protection. In this paper, we use quantization based digital watermark encryption technology on the Electrocardiogram (ECG) to protect patient rights and information. Three transform domains, DWT, DCT, and DFT are adopted to implement the quantization based watermarking technique. Although the watermark embedding process is not invertible, the change of the PQRST complexes and amplitude of the ECG signal is very small and so the watermarked data can meet the requirements of physiological diagnostics. In addition, the hidden information can be extracted without knowledge of the original ECG data. In other words, the proposed watermarking scheme is blind. Experimental results verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme.

61 citations


Cites methods from "Embedding patients confidential dat..."

  • ...[9] improved the least significant bit (LSB) watermarking technique and applied it to an ECG signal for hiding healthcare information....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A thorough review of the main watermarking algorithms implemented for traffic analysis purposes and imposes clarity and order in this branch of TA by providing a taxonomy of the algorithms proposed in the literature over the years, and categorize and present them based on carrier, visibility, and robustness.
Abstract: Traffic analysis (TA) is a useful tool aimed at understanding network traffic behavior. Basic network administration often takes advantage of TA for purposes such as security, intrusion detection, traffic shaping and policing, diagnostic monitoring, provisioning, and resource management. Network flow watermarking is a type of TA in which packet features of selected flows are manipulated in order to add a specific pattern easily identifiable when the watermarked flows cross an observation point. While passive TA has been extensively studied with hundreds of papers found in the literature, active TA, and more specifically network flow watermarking, has only recently attracted attention. Enforced robustness against traffic perturbations due to either natural network noise or attacks against passive TA have enhanced the appeal of this technique. The contribution of this paper is a thorough review of the main watermarking algorithms implemented for traffic analysis purposes. We present an overview of the motivations and the objectives that have led to the use of network flow watermarking. We also describe the general architecture of a watermarking system. In addition, we impose clarity and order in this branch of TA by providing a taxonomy of the algorithms proposed in the literature over the years, and categorize and present them based on carrier, visibility, and robustness.

40 citations


Cites background from "Embedding patients confidential dat..."

  • ...embedding information within a physical design) [13], [14]; and “human electrocardiogram (ECG) watermarking” (signal integrity verification) [15], [16]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work proposes a reversible, low-payload steganographic scheme for preserving the privacy of physiological signals, which is both reversible and blind like other Hamming-code based schemes.

37 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: This work provides an extensive view about the existing research works in the field of watermarking techniques on different biomedical signals, including the design and evaluation parameters serving as a guideline in the water marking schemes′ development and benchmarking and the comparative study between differentWatermarking methods.
Abstract: Recently, by means of technological innovation in communication networks and information, it has assisted healthcare experts across the world to seek high-quality diagnosis as well as to communicate each other as second opinions via enabling extensive and faster access to the patients’ electronic medical records, such as medical images. Medical images are extremely precious owing to its importance in diagnosis, education, and research. Recently, telemedicine applications in telediagnoisis, teleconsulting, telesurgery, and remote medical education play an imperative role in the advancement of the healthcare industry. Nevertheless, medical images are endured security risk, such as images tampering to comprise false data which may direct to wrong diagnosis and treatment. Consequently, watermarking of medical images offers the compulsory control over the flow of medical information. It is the typically used data hiding technique in the biomedical information security domain and legal authentication. In the field of telemedicine, exchange of medical signals is a very common practice. The signals are transmitted through the web and the wireless unguided media. The security and the authenticity are the matter of concern due to the various attacks on the web. Any type of the signals vulnerability in the biomedical data is not acceptable for the sake of proper diagnosis. A watermark is used to prove the ownership of the exchanged data. The logos of the hospitals or medical centers and electronic patient’s report card can be added to the biomedical signals as a watermark to establish the property right. This work provides an extensive view about the existing research works in the field of watermarking techniques on different biomedical signals. It includes the design and evaluation parameters serving as a guideline in the watermarking schemes′ development and benchmarking. This work also provides the comparative study between different watermarking methods. It reviews several aspects about digital watermarking in the medical domain. Also, it presented the properties of watermarking and several applications of watermarking. Meanwhile, it discusses the requirements and challenges that the biomedical watermarking process face.

37 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This study presents two types of data hiding methods based on coefficient alignment for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, namely, lossy and reversible ECG steganographys, both of which are capable of hiding confidential patient data in ECG signals.
Abstract: This study presents two types of data hiding methods based on coefficient alignment for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, namely, lossy and reversible ECG steganographys. The lossy method is divided into high-quality and high-capacity ECG steganography, both of which are capable of hiding confidential patient data in ECG signals. The reversible data hiding method can not only hide secret messages but also completely restore the original ECG signal after bit extraction. Simulations confirmed that the perceived quality generated by the lossy ECG steganography methods was good, while hiding capacity was acceptable. In addition, these methods have a certain degree of robustness, which is rare in conventional ECG stegangraphy schemes. Moreover, the proposed reversible ECG steganography method can not only successfully extract hidden messages but also completely recover the original ECG data.

33 citations


Cites methods from "Embedding patients confidential dat..."

  • ...[14] presented a steganographic method for ECG host signals based on the use of a technique for shifting special range numbers....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI

1,220 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The proposed method is robust and of much lower complexity than a complete decoding process followed by watermarking in the pixel domain and re-encoding, and is also applicable to other hybrid transform coding schemes like MPEG-1, MPEG-4, H.263.

861 citations


"Embedding patients confidential dat..." refers background in this paper

  • ...In recent years, data hiding models are gaining popularity in establishing more secured communication channels for delivering secret messages [3] since there is huge demand for sending sensitive information over the net....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Some results achieved by carrying out the classification tasks of equipment integrating the most common features of the ECG analysis: arrhythmia, myocardial ischemia, chronic alterations are presented.
Abstract: The analysis of ECGs can benefit from the wide availability of computing technology. This paper presents some results achieved by carrying out the classification tasks of equipment integrating the most common features of the ECG analysis: arrhythmia, myocardial ischemia, chronic alterations. Several ANN architectures are implemented, tested, and compared with competing alternatives. The approach, structure, and learning algorithm of ANNs are designed according to the features of each particular classification task. The trade-off between the time consuming training of ANNs and their performance is also explored. Data pre- and post-processing efforts for system performance are critically tested. The crucial role of these efforts for the reduction of input space dimensions, for a more significant description of the input features, and for improving new or ambiguous event processing is also documented. Finally, algorithm assessment is done on data coming from available ECG databases.

290 citations


"Embedding patients confidential dat..." refers background in this paper

  • ...ECG signal as shown in fig 1 is an electric signal that is generated by the heart which is used by cardiologists to diagnose the heart functionality [8] ....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
05 Apr 2004
TL;DR: A novel high bit rate LSB audio watermarking method using the proposed two-step algorithm, watermark bits are embedded into higher LSB layers, resulting in increased robustness against noise addition or MPEG compression.
Abstract: We present a novel high bit rate LSB audio watermarking method. The basic idea of the proposed LSB algorithm is watermark embedding that causes minimal embedding distortion of the host audio. Using the proposed two-step algorithm, watermark bits are embedded into higher LSB layers, resulting in increased robustness against noise addition or MPEG compression. Listening tests showed that the perceptual quality of watermarked audio is higher in the case of the proposed method than in the standard LSB method.

140 citations


"Embedding patients confidential dat..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Steganography is the communication art of sending and receiving secret messages that are hidden inside a specific host content such as images, waves, and videos [1]....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: A novel blind watermarking method with secret key by embedding ECG signals in medical images using the embedded zero-tree wavelet (EZW) algorithm, able to utilize about 15% of the host image to embed the mark signal.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel blind water- marking method with secret key by embedding ECG signals in medical images. The embedding is done when the original image is compressed using the embedded zero-tree wavelet (EZW) algorithm. The extraction process is performed at the decompression time of the watermarked image. Our algorithm has been tested on several CT and MRI images and the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) between the original and watermarked image is greater than 35 dB for watermarking of 512 to 8192 bytes of the mark signal. The proposed method is able to utilize about 15% of the host image to embed the mark signal. This marking percentage has improved previous works while preserving the image details. transmission overheads as well as helping for computer aided diagnostics system. In this paper we present a new watermarking method combined with the EZW-based wavelet coder. The principle is to replace significant wavelet coefficients of ECG signals by the corresponding significant wavelet coefficients belong- ing to the host image which is much bigger in size than the mark signal. This paper presents a brief introduction to watermarking and the EZW coder that acts as a platform for our watermarking algorithm.

102 citations


"Embedding patients confidential dat..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...In [6] Mohammed Nambakhsh and Alireza Ahmadian used the ECG signal as a secret data, and embedded it inside medical images like CT and MRI....

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