An Optimized Medical Image Watermarking Approach for E-Health Applications

Abstract

Background: In recent years, information and communication technologies have been widely used in the healthcare sector. This development enables E-Health applications to transmit medical data, as well as their sharing and remote access by healthcare professionals. However, due to their sensitivity, medical data in general, and medical images in particular, are vulnerable to a variety of illegitimate attacks. Therefore, suitable security and effective protection are necessary during transmission.

Method: In consideration of these challenges, we put forth a security system relying on digital watermarking with the aim of ensuring the integrity and authenticity of medical images. The proposed approach is based on Integer Wavelet Transform as an embedding algorithm; furthermore, Particles Swarm Optimization was employed to select the optimal scaling factor, which allows the system to be compatible with different medical imaging modalities.

Results: The experimental results demonstrate that the method provides a high imperceptibility and robustness for both secret watermark and watermarked images. In addition, the proposed scheme performs better for medical images compared with similar watermarking algorithms.

Conclusion: As it is suitable for a lossless-data application, IWT is the best choice for medical images integrity. Furthermore, using the PSO algorithm enables the algorithm to be compatible with different medical imaging modalities.