Digital Image Watermarking: Impact on Medical Imaging Applications in Telemedicine

With the advent of telemedicine, Digital Rights Management of medical images has become a critical issue pertaining to security and privacy preservation in the medical industry. The technology of telemedicine makes patient diagnosis possible for physicians located at a remote site. This technology involves electronic transmission of medical images over the internet, thus raising the need for ensuring security and privacy of such information. Digital watermarking is a widely used technique for the authentication and protection of multimedia data such as images and video against various security and privacy threats. But such digital rights management practices as watermarking often lead to considerable distortion or information loss of the medical images. The medical images being highly sensitive and legally valuable assets of the medical industry, such information loss are often not tolerable. Most importantly, such information loss may lead to incorrect patient diagnosis or reduced accuracy of disease detection. In this chapter we investigate the impact of digital watermarking, and its effect on the accuracy of disease diagnosis, specifically diagnosis of malarial infection caused by Plasmodium vivax parasite. We have used a computer–aided, automatic diagnostic model for our work in this chapter. Our experimental results show that although general (lossy) digital watermarking reduces the diagnostic accuracy, it can be improved with the use of reversible (lossless) watermarking. In fact, the adverse effect(s) of watermarking on the diagnostic accuracy can be completely mitigated through the use of reversible watermarking. Ruchira Naskar Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India Rajat Subhra Chakraborty Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India Dev Kumar Das Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India Chandan Chakraborty Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India