An Optimized Medical Image Watermarking Approach for E-Health Applications

Background: In recent years, information and communication technologies have been widely used in the healthcare sector. This development enables E-Health applications to transmit medical data, as well as their sharing and remote access by healthcare professionals. However, due to their sensitivity, medical data in general, and medical images in particular, are vulnerable to a variety of illegitimate attacks. Therefore, suitable security and effective protection are necessary during transmission. Method: In consideration of these challenges, we put forth a security system relying on digital watermarking with the aim of ensuring the integrity and authenticity of medical images. The proposed approach is based on Integer Wavelet Transform as an embedding algorithm; furthermore, Particles Swarm Optimization was employed to select the optimal scaling factor, which allows the system to be compatible with different medical imaging modalities. Results: The experimental results demonstrate that the method provides a high imperceptibility and robustness for both secret watermark and watermarked images. In addition, the proposed scheme performs better for medical images compared with similar watermarking algorithms. Conclusion: As it is suitable for a lossless-data application, IWT is the best choice for medical images integrity. Furthermore, using the PSO algorithm enables the algorithm to be compatible with different medical imaging modalities

Improved ECG watermarking technique using curvelet transform

Hiding data in electrocardiogram signals are a big challenge due to the embedded information that can hamper the accuracy of disease detection. On the other hand, hiding data into ECG signals provides more security for, and authenticity of, the patient\u27s data. Some recent studies used non-blind watermarking techniques to embed patient information and data of a patient into ECG signals. However, these techniques are not robust against attacks with noise and show a low performance in terms of parameters such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), normalized correlation (NC), mean square error (MSE), percentage residual difference (PRD), bit error rate (BER), structure similarity index measure (SSIM). In this study, an improved blind ECG-watermarking technique is proposed to embed the information of the patient\u27s data into the ECG signals using curvelet transform. The Euclidean distance between every two curvelet coefficients was computed to cluster the curvelet coefficients and after this, data were embedded into the selected clusters. This was an improvement not only in terms of extracting a hidden message from the watermarked ECG signals, but also robust against image-processing attacks. Performance metrics of SSIM, NC, PSNR and BER were used to measure the superiority of presented work. KL divergence and PRD were also used to reveal data hiding in curvelet coefficients of ECG without disturbing the original signal. The simulation results also demonstrated that the clustering method in the curvelet domain provided the best performance-even when the hidden messages were large size

ASB-CS: Adaptive sparse basis compressive sensing model and its application to medical image encryption

Recent advances in intelligent wearable devices have brought tremendous chances for the development of healthcare monitoring system. However, the data collected by various sensors in it are user-privacy-related information. Once the individuals’ privacy is subjected to attacks, it can potentially cause serious hazards. For this reason, a feasible solution built upon the compression-encryption architecture is proposed. In this scheme, we design an Adaptive Sparse Basis Compressive Sensing (ASB-CS) model by leveraging Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) manipulation, while performing a rigorous proof of its effectiveness. Additionally, incorporating the Parametric Deformed Exponential Rectified Linear Unit (PDE-ReLU) memristor, a new fractional-order Hopfield neural network model is introduced as a pseudo-random number generator for the proposed cryptosystem, which has demonstrated superior properties in many aspects, such as hyperchaotic dynamics and multistability. To be specific, a plain medical image is subjected to the ASB-CS model and bidirectional diffusion manipulation under the guidance of the key-controlled cipher flows to yield the corresponding cipher image without visual semantic features. Ultimately, the simulation results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme is capable of withstanding multiple security attacks and possesses balanced performance in terms of compressibility and robustness