Medical image watermarking: a survey on applications, approach and performance requirement compliance

Medical images are fundamentally utilized for rendering diagnostic and treatment to patients. Medical images are a patient body or part captured using medical imaging devices such as CT, X-Ray, PET, MRI, and US. Technological advancement introduces E-Healthcare systems, Telemedicine, and Electronic Health Information Systems (EHIS) enabling medical images to flow over the public network for remote healthcare services. The manipulation or replacement of medical images is fatal to the well-being of a patient, thereby requiring protection using watermarking. Watermarking is a data security approach toward protecting medical images against abuse by unauthorized personnel via providing confidentiality, authentication, and integrity verification. The dynamism and importance of medical image watermarking require constant literature update on trends, issues, and challenges which leading to the forgoing research survey. The survey proposes to highlight trending application areas in medical image watermarking research and evaluation of the recent approach adopted by researchers. Furthermore, the survey evaluates existing work in compliance with the standard benchmark requirement in design and performance and presents a discussion on the way forward to other possible research opportunities in the medical image watermarking domain.