Simultaneous storage of patient information with medical images in the frequency domain

doi:10.1016/j.cmpb.2004.02.009

Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine

Volume 76, Issue 1, October 2004, Pages 13-19

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2004.02.009 Get rights and content

Abstract

Digital watermarking is a technique of hiding specific identification data for copyright authentication. Most of the medical images are compressed by joint photographic experts group (JPEG) standard for storage. The watermarking is adapted here for interleaving patient information with medical images during JPEG compression, to reduce storage and transmission overheads. The text data is encrypted before interleaving with images in the frequency domain to ensure greater security. The graphical signals are also interleaved with the image. The result of this work is tabulated for a specific example and also compared with the spatial domain interleaving.

Introduction

With the present trend of using Internet as a medium to transmit images and patient data, it is of utmost importance to preserve the authenticity of patient information. Any exchange of data between hospitals involves large amount of vital patient information such as bio-signals, word documents and medical images. Therefore it requires efficient transmission and storage techniques to cut down cost of health care. Interleaving one form of data such as 1D signal, or text file, over digital images can combine the advantages of data security with efficient memory utilization [1]. In this paper, the authors adapt this technique to store texts and graphical signals in medical images by sharing last bits of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients from the middle frequency range onwards, in the frequency domain.

Section snippets

Methods and system description

The watermarking techniques are divided into two basic categories.

1.
Spatial domain watermarking [2], in which the least significant bit (LSB) of the image pixels is replaced with that of the watermark (authentication text). This method of spatial domain watermarking is very susceptible to noise. A more robust watermark can be embedded in the same way that a watermark is added to paper. In this method, a watermark symbol may be superimposed over an area of the picture and then some fixed intensity

Result

The ASCII codes of the encrypted text shown in Fig. 3b are broken into bits and interleaved into the DCT coefficients of Angiogram image of Fig.6a. The resulting image is shown in Fig. 6b. The interleaving in the middle frequency from 32 coefficients onwards does not affect the picture quality. This is attributed to the fact that the change in LSB of these DCTs does not affect the quality of the picture considerably.

A quantitative assessment of the method is obtained by evaluating the

Hardware and software specification

The program is developed in C programming. The image used has 256 gray levels. The program involves the encryption of the text/graphical file and interleaving in the frequency domain using the DCT.

Mode of availability

The program is freely available (source code, executables for Windows/DOS, documentation, picture/graphic files) on request from the author.

Conclusions

A technique of interleaving patient information text and graphical documents is presented for efficient storage. Text files are encrypted using logarithmic technique and then interleaved in the frequency domain. The technique is tested for different images and the NRMSE was found to be less than 5%. Security of information can be further enhanced by choosing the position of the interleaved bit according to a specific plan known only to the authorized users. The performance under noisy

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