Multiple image watermarking applied to health information management

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.