Reversible Watermarking Approach for Health Information System

Abstract

Health Information System [HIS] are gaining augmented acceptability and wide popularity as exchange of medical information and medical images between the healthcare centres are boosted up, which makes reversible watermarking emerge as an upcoming thrust area of research. This paper presents an efficient reversible approach for interleaving patient information in the form of Electro Cardio Graph [ECG] signal and hospital logo in the medical images. The proposed approach based on Discrete Wavelet Transform [DWT], utilizes the peak point of the difference image histogram for hiding the credentials of the corresponding patients. The superiority of the proposed approach is validated using 60 case studies of various modalities (CT, MRI, MRA and US) and comparing it with the spatial domain approach. Experimental results show that the histogram based approach using DWT gives high quality of watermarked image even after hiding the ECG signal encrypted with Adaptive Delta Modulation [ADM] and binary hospital logo. The high values of PSNR ensure the perceptual integrity, authentication of the patient's data and bandwidth reduction of the medical images as compared to the state of art methods.