Digital watermarking : applicability for developing trust in medical imaging workflows state of the art review

Medical images can be intentionally or unintentionally manipulated both within the secure medical system environment and outside, as images are viewed, extracted and transmitted. Many organisations have invested heavily in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), which are intended to facilitate data security. However, it is common for images, and records, to be extracted from these for a wide range of accepted practices, such as external second opinion, transmission to another care provider, patient data request, etc. Therefore, confirming trust within medical imaging workflows has become essential. Digital watermarking has been recognised as a promising approach for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of medical images. Authenticity refers to the ability to identify the information origin and prove that the data relates to the right patient. Integrity means the capacity to ensure that the information has not been altered without authorisation. This paper presents a survey of medical images watermarking and offers an evident scene for concerned researchers by analysing the robustness and limitations of various existing approaches. This includes studying the security levels of medical images within PACS system, clarifying the requirements of medical images watermarking and defining the purposes of watermarking approaches when applied to medical images

Lossy to lossless object-based coding of 3-D MRI data

We propose a fully three-dimensional object-based coding system exploiting the diagnostic relevance of the different regions of the volumetric data for rate allocation. The data are first decorrelated via a 3D discrete wavelet transform. The implementation via the lifting steps scheme allows to map integer-to-integer values, enabling lossless coding, and facilitates the definition of the object-based inverse transform. The coding process assigns disjoint segments of the bitstream to the different objects, which can be independently accessed and reconstructed at any up-to-lossless quality. Two fully 3D coding strategies are considered: Embedded Zerotree Coding (EZW-3D) and Multidimensional Layered Zero Coding (MLZC), both generalized for Region of Interest (ROI) based processing. In order to avoid artifacts along region boundaries, some extra coefficients must be encoded for each object. This gives rise to an overheading of the bitstream with respect to the case where the volume is encoded as a whole. The amount of such extra information depends on both the filter length and the decomposition depth. The system is characterized on a set of head magnetic resonance images. Results show that MLZC and EZW-3D have competitive performances. In particular, the best MLZC mode outperforms the other state-of-the-art techniques on one of the datasets for which results are available in the literature

Compression of MRI brain images based on automatic extraction of tumor region

In the compression of medical images, region of interest (ROI) based techniques seem to be promising, as they can result in high compression ratios while maintaining the quality of region of diagnostic importance, the ROI, when image is reconstructed. In this article, we propose a set-up for compression of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images based on automatic extraction of tumor. Our approach is to first separate the tumor, the ROI in our case, from brain image, using support vector machine (SVM) classification and region extraction step. Then, tumor region (ROI) is compressed using Arithmetic coding, a lossless compression technique. The non-tumorous region, non-region of interest (NROI), is compressed using a lossy compression technique formed by a combination of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) and arithmetic coding (AC). The classification performance parameters, like, dice coefficient, sensitivity, positive predictive value and accuracy are tabulated. In the case of compression, we report, performance parameters like mean square error and peak signal to noise ratio for a given set of bits per pixel (bpp) values. We found that the compression scheme considered in our setup gives promising results as compared to other schemes

Standard and specific compression techniques for DNA microarray images

We review the state of the art in DNA microarray image compression and provide original comparisons between standard and microarray-specific compression techniques that validate and expand previous work. First, we describe the most relevant approaches published in the literature and classify them according to the stage of the typical image compression process where each approach makes its contribution, and then we summarize the compression results reported for these microarray-specific image compression schemes. In a set of experiments conducted for this paper, we obtain new results for several popular image coding techniques that include the most recent coding standards. Prediction-based schemes CALIC and JPEG-LS are the best-performing standard compressors, but are improved upon by the best microarray-specific technique, Battiato's CNN-based scheme