Securing a Publicly Accessible Database of Medical Images Using Watermarking with Direct Diagnose Capability

This article deals with an issue, how the database of medical images can be provided publicly or for limited group of people, so that their authors do not have to worry about its unauthorized use. We are facing this problem in the project MeDiMed, where we have a large database of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) images from different medical areas, which are supplemented with a structured report with the case history and diagnosis. We want to make this database available to medical students and doctors, but we need ensure authors that their effort with describing images will not be misused. Data should be secured in such a way that the same data source can be used for studying as well as for diagnostics purposes. But at the same time, it should be able to prove its authorship and origin. The combination of two watermarking methods is proposed for this purpose.