Watermarking Algorithm for Medical Images Authentication

Telemedicine is enabling medical health records to be in the electronic format, which is called electronic patient's records, EPRs, and making them available to the users via the Internet. It provides cheap and effective healthcare to rural patients. However, information privacy and security issues continue to plague telemedicine projects, especially due to the extensive use of new communication technologies like wireless network. EPRs contain very sensitive information, which should not be made accessible to unauthorized persons in order to protect patient privacy, integrity and confidentiality. At the same time patient information should be readily available whenever required by authorized users for authentic purposes. Although the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act HIPAA of 1996, cryptography and steganography provide certain solution to the security and privacy issues, digital watermarking is proved to be the best technique in curving the threat that have threatened telemedicine project. Here in this research, a discrete wavelet-based digital watermarking technique, which uses blind detection, that will be able to detect any attempt to theft of medical data will be developed. The algorithm is combined of two parts: the first part is responsible for embedding the watermark which contains the patient critical information in the medical image and it is named 'embedder', the second part is responsible about confirming the authentication of the medical image after being sent through a communication medium that is vulnerable to attack and it is named 'extractor'. The result of this algorithm measured using PSNR and it was with the acceptable range and objective of this project was achieved.