Medical image authentication and self-correction through an adaptive reversible watermarking technique

Abstract

With the advent of Information Technology in the medical world, various radiological modalities produce a variety of digital medical files most often datasets and images. These files as any digital asset should be protected from unwanted modification of their contents, especially as they contain vital medical information. Thus their protection and authentication seems of great importance and this need will rise along with the future standardization of exchange of data between hospitals or between patients and doctors. Watermarking, a technique first introduced for multimedia files, provides a method for authentication and protection and has been recently applied to medical images. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking technique where the region of non-interest (RONI) of medical Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images, is used to embed the region of interest (ROI). In this way, any tampering attempt, not only will be detected, but also the image could be self-restored, back to its previous, ldquooriginalrdquo form by extracting the ROI from the RONI.