Multiple image watermarking applied to health information management

Analysis of Publications on Health Information Management Using the Science Mapping Method: A Holistic Perspective

OBJECTIVE

In the age of digital transformation, there is a need for a sustainable information management vision in health. Understanding the accumulation of health information management (HIM) knowledge from the past to the present and building a new vision to meet this need reveals the importance of understanding the available scientific knowledge. With this research, it is aimed to examine the scientific documents of the last 40 years of HIM literature with a holistic approach using science mapping techniques and to guide future research.

METHODS

This study used a bibliometric analysis method for science mapping. Co-citation and co-occurrence document analyses were performed on 630 academic publications selected from the Web of Science core collection (WoSCC) database using the keyword "Health Information Management" and inclusion criteria. The analyses were performed using the R-based software Bibliometrix (Version 4.0; K-Synth Srl), Python (Version 3.12.1; The Python Software Foundation), and Microsoft® Excel® 2016.

RESULTS

Co-occurrence analyses revealed the themes of personal health records, clinical coding and data quality, and health information management. The HIM theme consisted of five subthemes: "electronic records", "medical informatics", "e-health and telemedicine", "health education and awareness", and "health information systems (HISs)". As a result of the co-citation analysis, the prominent themes were technology acceptance, standardized clinical coding, the success of HISs, types of electronic records, people with HIM, health informatics used by consumers, e-health, e-mobile health technologies, and countries' frameworks and standards for HISs.

CONCLUSIONS

This comprehensive bibliometric study shows that structured information can be helpful in understanding research trends in HIM. This study identified critical issues in HIM, identified meaningful themes, and explained the topic from a holistic perspective for all health system actors and stakeholders who want to work in the field of HIM.

ROI-based medical image watermarking for accurate tamper detection, localisation and recovery

Smart healthcare systems play a vital role in the current era of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS); i.e. Industry 4.0. Medical data security has become the integral part of smart hospital applications to ensure data privacy and patient data security. Usually, patient medical reports and diagnostic images are transferred to the specialist physician in other hospitals for effective diagnostics. Therefore, the transmission of medical data over the internet has attained significant interest among many researchers. The three main challenges associated with the e-healthcare systems are the following: (1) ensuring authentication of medical information; (2) transmission of medical image and patient health record (PHR) should not cause data mismatch/detachment; and (3) medical image should not be modified accidentally or intentionally as they are transmitted over the insecure medium. Thus, it is highly essential to ensure the integrity of the medical image, especially the region of interest (ROI) before taking any diagnostic decisions. Watermarking is a well-known technique used to overcome these challenges. The current research work has developed a watermarking algorithm to ensure integrity and authentication of the medical data and image. In this paper, a novel watermarking algorithm is designed based on Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), combined chaotic map, recovery bit generation and SHA-256 to address the objective as mentioned earlier. The paper's significant contribution is divided into four phases, namely, watermark generation and data embedding phase, authentication phase, tamper detection phase and localisation and lossless recovery phase. Experiments are carried out to prove that the developed IWT-based data embedding scheme offers high robustness to the data embedded in region of non-interest (RONI), detects and localises the tampered blocks inside ROI with 100% accuracy and recovers the tampered segments of ROI with zero MSE. Further, a comparison is made with the state-of-art schemes to verify the sternness of the developed system.

A Reversible Watermarking System for Medical Color Images: Balancing Capacity, Imperceptibility, and Robustness

The authenticity and integrity of medical images in telemedicine has to be protected. Robust reversible watermarking (RRW) algorithms provide copyright protection and the original images can be recovered at the receiver’s end. However, the existing algorithms have limitations in their ability to balance the tradeoff among robustness, imperceptibility, and embedded capacity. Some of them are even not completely reversible. Besides, most medical image watermarking algorithms are not designed for color images. To improve their performance in protecting medical color image information, we propose a novel RRW scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). First, the DWT provides a robust solution. Second, the modification of the wavelet domain coefficient guarantees the changes of integer values in the spatial domain and ensures the reversibility of the watermarking scheme. Third, the embedding scheme makes full use of the characteristics of the original image and watermarking. This reduces the modification of the original image and ensures better imperceptibility. Lastly, the selection of the Zernike moments order for geometric correction is optimized to predict attack parameters more accurately by using less information. This enhances the robustness of the proposed scheme against geometric attacks such as rotation and scaling. The proposed scheme is robust against common and geometric attacks and has a high embedding capacity without obvious distortion of the image. The paper contributes towards improving the security of medical images in remote healthcare.

Blockchain-Based Distributed Patient-Centric Image Management System

In recent years, many researchers have focused on developing a feasible solution for storing and exchanging medical images in the field of health care. Current practices are deployed on cloud-based centralized data centers, which increase maintenance costs, require massive storage space, and raise privacy concerns about sharing information over a network. Therefore, it is important to design a framework to enable sharing and storing of big medical data efficiently within a trustless environment. In the present paper, we propose a novel proof-of-concept design for a distributed patient-centric image management (PCIM) system that is aimed to ensure safety and control of patient private data without using a centralized infrastructure. In this system, we employed an emerging Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system technology called Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). Then, we implemented an Ethereum smart contract called the patient-centric access control protocol to enable a distributed and trustworthy access control policy. IPFS provides the means for decentralized storage of medical images with global accessibility. We describe how the PCIM system architecture facilitates the distributed and secured patient-centric data access across multiple entities such as hospitals, patients, and image requestors. Finally, we deployed a smart contract prototype on an Ethereum testnet blockchain and evaluated the proposed framework within the Windows environment. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is efficient and feasible.

Privacy Protection of Patient Medical Images using Digital Watermarking Technique for E-healthcare System

BACKGROUND

Privacy protection has been a critical issue in the delivery of medical images for telemedicine, e-health care and other remote medical systems.

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this proposed work is to implement a secure, reversible, digital watermarking technique for the transmission of medical data remotely in health care systems.

METHODS

In this research work, we employed a novel optimized digital watermarking scheme using discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition using cuckoo search algorithm based on Lévy flight for embedding watermark into the grayscale medical images of the patient. The performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated on four different 256 × 256 grayscale host medical images and a 32 × 32 binary logo image.

RESULTS

The performance of the proposed scheme in terms of peak signal to noise ratio was remarkably high, with an average of 55.022dB compared to other methods.

CONCLUSION

Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is capable of achieving superior performance compared to some of the state-of-art schemes in terms of robustness, security and high embedding capacity which is required in the field of telemedicine and e-health care system.

A Discrete Wavelet Based Watermarking Scheme for Authentication of Medical Images

The growth and emergence of telemedicine has resulted into considerable increase in the transfer of medical images between various health centers over computer networks for various purposes, such as diagnosis, clinical interpretation, and archives. The security of these images is a serious concern since these images can be manipulated during their transmission over the network. Moreover, as the authentication of the medical images is required for various legal purposes; the information security requirement specifications specified by various legislative rules must be adhered by the concerned stakeholders. In this research, a discrete wavelet-based watermarking scheme has been proposed for the authentication of medical images. The experimental results obtained have shown that the proposed scheme is a secure one and robust against various common image processing attacks.

Medical Image Reliability Verification Using Hash Signatures and Sequential Square Encoding

Increased growth of information technology in healthcare has led to a situation where the security of patient information is more important and is a critical issue. The aim of the proposed algorithm is to provide a framework to verify the integrity of the medical images. In this paper, the integrity of the medical images is verified by embedding hash signatures using the sequential square embedding technique. This technique is as efficient as the diamond encoding technique but with increased payload capability. The medical image is first divided into the region of interest (ROI) block and the signature block. The hash signatures are determined by dividing the ROI into nonoverlapping blocks. During the data hiding stage, the hash signatures are embedded in randomly chosen pixel pairs in the signature block using the sequential square encoding (SSE) technique. In the experimental results, the data hiding capacity of the proposed SSE technique is verified in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the medical image integrity is substantiated by comparing the L2 norm between computed and extracted hash signatures. Modifications such as contrast enhancement, rotation, scaling, and changing the image information result in increased L2 norm; thus, the integrity of the medical images can be verified. The parameters required for embedding, such as the embedding parameter and the seed for random sequence generation, are encrypted and communicated to the receiving end. Hence, the proposed algorithm provides a secure framework for medical image integrity verification.

Protection of Health Imagery by Region Based Lossless Reversible Watermarking Scheme

Providing authentication and integrity in medical images is a problem and this work proposes a new blind fragile region based lossless reversible watermarking technique to improve trustworthiness of medical images. The proposed technique embeds the watermark using a reversible least significant bit embedding scheme. The scheme combines hashing, compression, and digital signature techniques to create a content dependent watermark making use of compressed region of interest (ROI) for recovery of ROI as reported in literature. The experiments were carried out to prove the performance of the scheme and its assessment reveals that ROI is extracted in an intact manner and PSNR values obtained lead to realization that the presented scheme offers greater protection for health imageries.

Providing integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality for header and pixel data of DICOM images

Exchange of medical images over public networks is subjected to different types of security threats. This has triggered persisting demands for secured telemedicine implementations that will provide confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity for the transmitted images. The medical image exchange standard (DICOM) offers mechanisms to provide confidentiality for the header data of the image but not for the pixel data. On the other hand, it offers mechanisms to achieve authenticity and integrity for the pixel data but not for the header data. In this paper, we propose a crypto-based algorithm that provides confidentially, authenticity, and integrity for the pixel data, as well as for the header data. This is achieved by applying strong cryptographic primitives utilizing internally generated security data, such as encryption keys, hashing codes, and digital signatures. The security data are generated internally from the header and the pixel data, thus a strong bond is established between the DICOM data and the corresponding security data. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated extensively using DICOM images of different modalities. Simulation experiments show that confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity have been achieved as reflected by the results we obtained for normalized correlation, entropy, PSNR, histogram analysis, and robustness.

Application of Fractional Wave Packet Transform for Robust Watermarking of Mammograms

Exchanging of medical data requires efficient authentication and protection of medical data that can be illegally modified. Watermarking plays an important role in protecting, sharing, and securing medical data. In this work, a robust nonblind medical image watermarking scheme is proposed. The process involves two steps: the embedding and the extraction phase. During the embedding phase, l-level FRWPT is performed on the host image and the watermark is embedded into the modified reference image. In the second phase, inverse FRWPT is performed on the watermarked image to extract the watermark from the watermarked image. The proposed scheme is tested on mammograms images and is subjected to common attacks like Gaussian filtering, median filtering, compression, sharpening, and contrast adjustments. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust.

Content-independent embedding scheme for multi-modal medical image watermarking

Background

As the increasing adoption of information technology continues to offer better distant medical services, the distribution of, and remote access to digital medical images over public networks continues to grow significantly. Such use of medical images raises serious concerns for their continuous security protection, which digital watermarking has shown great potential to address.

Methods

We present a content-independent embedding scheme for medical image watermarking. We observe that the perceptual content of medical images varies widely with their modalities. Recent medical image watermarking schemes are image-content dependent and thus they may suffer from inconsistent embedding capacity and visual artefacts. To attain the image content-independent embedding property, we generalise RONI (region of non-interest, to the medical professionals) selection process and use it for embedding by utilising RONI’s least significant bit-planes. The proposed scheme thus avoids the need for RONI segmentation that incurs capacity and computational overheads.

Results

Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed embedding scheme performs consistently over a dataset of 370 medical images including their 7 different modalities. Experimental results also verify how the state-of-the-art reversible schemes can have an inconsistent performance for different modalities of medical images. Our scheme has MSSIM (Mean Structural SIMilarity) larger than 0.999 with a deterministically adaptable embedding capacity.

Conclusions

Our proposed image-content independent embedding scheme is modality-wise consistent, and maintains a good image quality of RONI while keeping all other pixels in the image untouched. Thus, with an appropriate watermarking framework (i.e., with the considerations of watermark generation, embedding and detection functions), our proposed scheme can be viable for the multi-modality medical image applications and distant medical services such as teleradiology and eHealth.

Watermarking techniques used in medical images: a survey

The ever-growing numbers of medical digital images and the need to share them among specialists and hospitals for better and more accurate diagnosis require that patients' privacy be protected. As a result of this, there is a need for medical image watermarking (MIW). However, MIW needs to be performed with special care for two reasons. Firstly, the watermarking procedure cannot compromise the quality of the image. Secondly, confidential patient information embedded within the image should be flawlessly retrievable without risk of error after image decompressing. Despite extensive research undertaken in this area, there is still no method available to fulfill all the requirements of MIW. This paper aims to provide a useful survey on watermarking and offer a clear perspective for interested researchers by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of different existing methods.

Medical Image Watermarking Technique for Accurate Tamper Detection in ROI and Exact Recovery of ROI

In telemedicine while transferring medical images tampers may be introduced. Before making any diagnostic decisions, the integrity of region of interest (ROI) of the received medical image must be verified to avoid misdiagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel fragile block based medical image watermarking technique to avoid embedding distortion inside ROI, verify integrity of ROI, detect accurately the tampered blocks inside ROI, and recover the original ROI with zero loss. In this proposed method, the medical image is segmented into three sets of pixels: ROI pixels, region of noninterest (RONI) pixels, and border pixels. Then, authentication data and information of ROI are embedded in border pixels. Recovery data of ROI is embedded into RONI. Results of experiments conducted on a number of medical images reveal that the proposed method produces high quality watermarked medical images, identifies the presence of tampers inside ROI with 100% accuracy, and recovers the original ROI without any loss.

Two-layer fragile watermarking method secured with chaotic map for authentication of digital Holy Quran

This paper presents a novel watermarking method to facilitate the authentication and detection of the image forgery on the Quran images. Two layers of embedding scheme on wavelet and spatial domain are introduced to enhance the sensitivity of fragile watermarking and defend the attacks. Discrete wavelet transforms are applied to decompose the host image into wavelet prior to embedding the watermark in the wavelet domain. The watermarked wavelet coefficient is inverted back to spatial domain then the least significant bits is utilized to hide another watermark. A chaotic map is utilized to blur the watermark to make it secure against the local attack. The proposed method allows high watermark payloads, while preserving good image quality. Experiment results confirm that the proposed methods are fragile and have superior tampering detection even though the tampered area is very small.

Effective management of medical information through ROI-lossless fragile image watermarking technique

In this article, we have proposed a blind, fragile and Region of Interest (ROI) lossless medical image watermarking (MIW) technique, providing an all-in-one solution tool to various medical data distribution and management issues like security, content authentication, safe archiving, controlled access retrieval, and captioning. The proposed scheme combines lossless data compression and encryption technique to embed electronic health record (EHR)/DICOM metadata, image hash, indexing keyword, doctor identification code and tamper localization information in the medical images. Extensive experiments (both subjective and objective) were carried out to evaluate performance of the proposed MIW technique. The findings offer suggestive evidence that the proposed MIW scheme is an effective all-in-one solution tool to various issues of medical information management domain. Moreover, given its relative simplicity, the proposed scheme can be applied to the medical images to serve in many medical applications concerned with privacy protection, safety, and management.

A review of medical image watermarking requirements for teleradiology

Teleradiology allows medical images to be transmitted over electronic networks for clinical interpretation and for improved healthcare access, delivery, and standards. Although such remote transmission of the images is raising various new and complex legal and ethical issues, including image retention and fraud, privacy, malpractice liability, etc., considerations of the security measures used in teleradiology remain unchanged. Addressing this problem naturally warrants investigations on the security measures for their relative functional limitations and for the scope of considering them further. In this paper, starting with various security and privacy standards, the security requirements of medical images as well as expected threats in teleradiology are reviewed. This will make it possible to determine the limitations of the conventional measures used against the expected threats. Furthermore, we thoroughly study the utilization of digital watermarking for teleradiology. Following the key attributes and roles of various watermarking parameters, justification for watermarking over conventional security measures is made in terms of their various objectives, properties, and requirements. We also outline the main objectives of medical image watermarking for teleradiology and provide recommendations on suitable watermarking techniques and their characterization. Finally, concluding remarks and directions for future research are presented.

Effective management of medical information through a novel blind watermarking technique

Medical Data Management (MDM) domain consists of various issues of medical information like authentication, security, privacy, retrieval and storage etc. Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) techniques have recently emerged as a leading technology to solve the problems associated with MDM. This paper proposes a blind, Contourlet Transform (CNT) based MIW scheme, robust to high JPEG and JPEG2000 compression and simultaneously capable of addressing a range of MDM issues like medical information security, content authentication, safe archiving and controlled access retrieval etc. It also provides a way for effective data communication along with automated medical personnel teaching. The original medical image is first decomposed by CNT. The Low pass subband is used to embed the watermark in such a way that enables the proposed method to extract the embedded watermark in a blind manner. Inverse CNT is then applied to get the watermarked image. Extensive experiments were carried out and the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through both subjective and quantitative measures. The experimental results and comparisons, confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed technique in the MDM paradigm.

Nested quantization index modulation for reversible watermarking and its application to healthcare information management systems

Digital watermarking has attracted lots of researches to healthcare information management systems for access control, patients' data protection, and information retrieval. The well-known quantization index modulation-(QIM-) based watermarking has its limitations as the host image will be destroyed; however, the recovery of medical images is essential to avoid misdiagnosis. In this paper, we propose the nested QIM-based watermarking, which is preferable to the QIM-based watermarking for the medical image applications. As the host image can be exactly reconstructed by the nested QIM-based watermarking. The capacity of the embedded watermark can be increased by taking advantage of the proposed nest structure. The algorithm and mathematical model of the nested QIM-based watermarking including forward and inverse model is presented. Due to algorithms and architectures of forward and inverse nested QIM, the concurrent programs and special processors for the nested QIM-based watermarking are easily implemented.

A contextual based double watermarking of PET images by patient ID and ECG signal

This paper presents a novel digital watermarking framework using electrocardiograph (ECG) and demographic text data as double watermarks. It protects patient medical information and prevents mismatching diagnostic information. The watermarks are embedded in selected texture regions of a PET image using multi-resolution wavelet decomposition. Experimental results show that modifications in these locations are visually imperceptible. The robustness of the watermarks is verified through measurement of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), cross-correlation (CC%), structural similarity measure (SSIM) and universal image quality index (UIQI). Their robustness is also computed using pixel-based metrics and human visual system metrics. Additionally, beta factor (β) as an edge preservation measure is used for degradation evaluation of the image boundaries throughout the watermarked PET image. Assessment of the extracted watermarks shows watermarking robustness to common attacks such as embedded zero-tree wavelet (EZW) compression and median filtering.

A dual adaptive watermarking scheme in contourlet domain for DICOM images

BACKGROUND

Nowadays, medical imaging equipments produce digital form of medical images. In a modern health care environment, new systems such as PACS (picture archiving and communication systems), use the digital form of medical image too. The digital form of medical images has lots of advantages over its analog form such as ease in storage and transmission. Medical images in digital form must be stored in a secured environment to preserve patient privacy. It is also important to detect modifications on the image. These objectives are obtained by watermarking in medical image.

METHODS

In this paper, we present a dual and oblivious (blind) watermarking scheme in the contourlet domain. Because of importance of ROI (region of interest) in interpretation by medical doctors rather than RONI (region of non-interest), we propose an adaptive dual watermarking scheme with different embedding strength in ROI and RONI. We embed watermark bits in singular value vectors of the embedded blocks within lowpass subband in contourlet domain.

RESULTS

The values of PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) and SSIM (structural similarity measure) index of ROI for proposed DICOM (digital imaging and communications in medicine) images in this paper are respectively larger than 64 and 0.997. These values confirm that our algorithm has good transparency. Because of different embedding strength, BER (bit error rate) values of signature watermark are less than BER values of caption watermark. Our results show that watermarked images in contourlet domain have greater robustness against attacks than wavelet domain. In addition, the qualitative analysis of our method shows it has good invisibility.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed contourlet-based watermarking algorithm in this paper uses an automatically selection for ROI and embeds the watermark in the singular values of contourlet subbands that makes the algorithm more efficient, and robust against noise attacks than other transform domains. The embedded watermark bits can be extracted without the original image, the proposed method has high PSNR and SSIM, and the watermarked image has high transparency and can still conform to the DICOM format.

Wavelet packets-based blind watermarking for medical image management

The last decade has witnessed an explosive use of medical images and Electronics Patient Record (EPR) in the healthcare sector for facilitating the sharing of patient information and exchange between networked hospitals and healthcare centers. To guarantee the security, authenticity and management of medical images and information through storage and distribution, the watermarking techniques are growing to protect the medical healthcare information. This paper presents a technique for embedding the EPR information in the medical image to save storage space and transmission overheads and to guarantee security of the shared data. In this paper a new method for protecting the patient information in which the information is embedded as a watermark in the discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT) of the medical image using the hospital logo as a reference image. The patient information is coded by an error correcting code (ECC), BCH code, to enhance the robustness of the proposed method. The scheme is blind so that the EPR can be extracted from the medical image without the need of the original image. Therefore, this proposed technique is useful in telemedicine applications. Performance of the proposed method was tested using four modalities of medical images; MRA, MRI, Radiological, and CT. Experimental results showed no visible difference between the watermarked and the original image. Moreover, the proposed watermarking method is robust against a wide range of attacks such as JPEG coding, Gaussian noise addition, histogram equalization, gamma correction, contrast adjustment, and sharpen filter and rotation.

Watermark-Only Security Attack on DM-QIM Watermarking

This paper addresses the security of a specific class of common watermarking methods based on Dither modulation-quantisation index modulation (DM-QIM) and focusing on watermark-only attacks (WOA). The vulnerabilities of and probable attacks on lattice structure based watermark embedding methods have been presented in the literature. DM-QIM is one of the best known lattice structure based watermarking techniques. In this paper, the authors discuss a watermark-only attack scenario (the attacker has access to a single watermarked content only). In the literature it is an assumption that DM-QIM methods are secure to WOA. However, the authors show that the DM-QIM based embedding method is vulnerable against a guided key guessing attack by exploiting subtle statistical regularities in the feature space embeddings for time series and images. Using a distribution-free algorithm, this paper presents an analysis of the attack and numerical results for multiple examples of image and time series data.

Authentication and data hiding using a hybrid ROI-based watermarking scheme for DICOM images

Authenticating medical images using watermarking techniques has become a very popular area of research, and some works in this area have been reported worldwide recently. Besides authentication, many data-hiding techniques have been proposed to conceal patient's data into medical images aiming to reduce the cost needed to store data and the time needed to transmit data when required. In this paper, we present a new hybrid watermarking scheme for DICOM images. In our scheme, two well-known techniques are combined to gain the advantages of both and fulfill the requirements of authentication and data hiding. The scheme divides the images into two parts, the region of interest (ROI) and the region of non-interest (RONI). Patient's data are embedded into ROI using a reversible technique based on difference expansion, while tamper detection and recovery data are embedded into RONI using a robust technique based on discrete wavelet transform. The experimental results show the ability of hiding patient's data with a very good visual quality, while ROI, the most important area for diagnosis, is retrieved exactly at the receiver side. The scheme also shows some robustness against certain levels of salt and pepper and cropping noise.

Mixed reversible and RONI watermarking for medical image reliability protection

By attaching image authenticity and integrity proofs directly at the pixels level of an image, watermarking can help to raise up medical image protection. However, because of the induced distortions, specific schemes like lossless data hiding or watermarking Regions of Non Interest (RONI) have been proposed to guarantee the preservation of the image interpretation. In this article, we propose an image reliability protection mechanism which combines advantages of both lossless and RONI approaches in order to provide a better and continuous protection. The proposed system was applied to magnetic resonance images of the head. Experimental results illustrate the overall functionality of the system.

Watermarking SDK implementation to facilitate integration in a secure healthcare environment

The implementation of digital watermarking technology in healthcare applications is still in its infancy; however, the benefits of exploring this technology towards secure and efficient health data management are steadily propagated and realized by the research community. The paper presents the architecture of a watermarking software development kit (SDK), which provides multiple watermarking functionality and can be customized according to the targeted medical application, in order to address security of sensitive data, origin and data authentication, image archiving and retrieval. Two use cases of the proposed watermarking SDK are presented, the one involving access to the watermarking engine through a user interface, and the other referring to the case that the engine is embedded into the image acquisition device. The nature of the embeddable information that is applicable in each use case is also described.

Digital watermarking in telemedicine applications--towards enhanced data security and accessibility

Implementing telemedical solutions has become a trend amongst the various research teams at an international level. Yet, contemporary information access and distribution technologies raise critical issues that urgently need to be addressed, especially those related to security. The paper suggests the use of watermarking in telemedical applications in order to enhance security of the transmitted sensitive medical data, familiarizes the users with a telemedical system and a watermarking module that have already been developed, and proposes an architecture that will enable the integration of the two systems, taking into account a variety of use cases and application scenarios.