Protecting patient privacy against unauthorized release of medical images in a group communication environment.

In this paper, we identify and study an important patient privacy protection problem related to medical images. Following Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandate on privacy protection of patients' medical records, efforts have been devoted to guaranteeing the confidentiality of data and medical images during storage and transmission via an untrustworthy channel. However, to our knowledge, there has not been any effort towards protecting against unauthorized release of images by an authorized recipient. In this paper, we study the problem of tracing illegally distributed medical images in a group communication environment and identify a set of design requirements that must be met. We propose a fingerprint model suitable for many-to-many multicast, that is computationally efficient and scalable in user storage and key update communication. Simulation results also show that our scheme is highly robust to typical medical image processing and collusion attacks, while yielding high quality watermarked images.

[1]  U. Rajendra Acharya,et al.  Reliable and robust transmission and storage of medical images with patient information , 2004, 2004 International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications, 2004. SPCOM '04..

[2]  Bernd Girod,et al.  Scalar Costa scheme for information embedding , 2003, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[3]  John S. Baras,et al.  An information-theoretic approach for design and analysis of rooted-tree-based multicast key management schemes , 2001, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[4]  Roland Parviainen,et al.  Large Scale distributed watermarking of multicast media through encryption , 2001, Communications and Multimedia Security.

[5]  Harry L. Van Trees,et al.  Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, Part I , 1968 .

[6]  容子 星野,et al.  内視鏡におけるDICOM（Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine）画像の有用性 , 2000 .

[7]  R. Collorec,et al.  Relevance of watermarking in medical imaging , 2000, Proceedings 2000 IEEE EMBS International Conference on Information Technology Applications in Biomedicine. ITAB-ITIS 2000. Joint Meeting Third IEEE EMBS International Conference on Information Technol.

[8]  Mingyan Li,et al.  Tracing Medical Images Using Multi-Band Watermarks , 2004, The 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[9]  Hua Wang,et al.  A secure multicast protocol with copyright protection , 2002, CCRV.

[10]  H. V. Trees.  Detection, Estimation, And Modulation Theory , 2001 .

[11]  Martin F. H. Schuurmans,et al.  Digital watermarking , 2002, Proceedings of ASP-DAC/VLSI Design 2002. 7th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference and 15h International Conference on VLSI Design.

[12]  Keh-Shih Chuang,et al.  A novel image quality index using Moran I statistics. , 2003, Physics in medicine and biology.

[13]  John D. Villasenor,et al.  Visual thresholds for wavelet quantization error , 1996, Electronic Imaging.

[14]  Shyhtsun Felix Wu,et al.  Selective Encryption and Watermarking of MPEG Video (Extended Abstract) , 1997 .

[15]  Mostafa H. Ammar,et al.  WHIM: watermarking multicast video with a hierarchy of intermediaries , 2002, Comput. Networks.

[16]  Gregory W. Wornell,et al.  Quantization index modulation: A class of provably good methods for digital watermarking and information embedding , 2001, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[17]  Colin Perkins,et al.  Watercasting: Distributed Watermarking of Multicast Media , 1999, Networked Group Communication.

[18]  A. Bovik,et al.  A universal image quality index , 2002, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[19]  Wenjun Zeng,et al.  Image-adaptive watermarking using visual models , 1998, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[20]  J A Brink,et al.  Evaluation of JPEG and wavelet compression of body CT images for direct digital teleradiologic transmission. , 2000, Radiology.

[21]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Invertible authentication , 2001, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents.

[22]  Andrew B. Watson,et al.  DCT quantization matrices visually optimized for individual images , 1993, Electronic Imaging.

[23]  Yuang-Chin Chiang,et al.  A statistical method for evaluation quality of medical images: a case study in bit discarding and image compression. , 2004, Computerized medical imaging and graphics : the official journal of the Computerized Medical Imaging Society.

[24]  H K Huang,et al.  Medical image security in a HIPAA mandated PACS environment. , 2003, Computerized medical imaging and graphics : the official journal of the Computerized Medical Imaging Society.

[25]  Michael R. Chernick,et al.  Wavelet Methods for Time Series Analysis , 2001, Technometrics.

[26]  Ingemar J. Cox,et al.  Secure spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia , 1997, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[27]  Tenkasi V. Ramabadran,et al.  Near-lossless compression of medical images through entropy-coded DPCM , 1994, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.