Enhancing security of DICOM images during storage and transmission in distributed environment

Abstract

Digital watermarking is proposed as a method to enhance medical data security. Medical image watermarking requires extreme care when embedding additional information within medical images, because the additional information should not degrade medical image quality. Doctors diagnose medical images by seeing Region of Interest (ROI). A ROI of a medical image is an area including important information and must be stored without any distortion. If a medical image is illegally obtained or if its content is changed, it may lead to wrong diagnosis. In our scheme a well-known technique least significant bit substitution (LSB) is adapted to fulfill the requirements of data hiding and authentication in medical images. The scheme divide Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) image into two parts ROI and non-ROI (non-region of interest). The DS (Digital Signature) which include patient data and SOP Instance UID are embedded randomly into the LSB border of the image. The DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) of ROI-MSB (most significant bit) embedded into the LSB middle of the image. The Result shows the ability to hide and retrieve DS in non-ROI, while ROI, the most important area for diagnosis, is retrieved exactly at the receiver side. © 2011 Indian Academy of Sciences.