Efficient management of ultrasound images using digital watermarking

Nowadays, the administration of medical images can be compromised by several information security issues. Among others, a first problem consists in authenticating the source that originated the medical image and verifying that it corresponds to the correct patient; a second problem is aimed to avoid detachment between an electronic patient record and its corresponding images. A promising solution is the use of digital watermarking techniques applied to medical images considering in the design requirements of imperceptibility-robustness of the field of medical imaging. In this paper a digital watermarking method for an efficient administration of ultrasound images is proposed. To avoid the detachment between the record and images, we use an invisible watermarking in the frequency domain of the image. To authenticate the source of origin of the medical image, we use a visible-imperceptible watermarking in the spatial domain of the image. The experimental results show an efficient robustness and imperceptibility of the embedded watermark signals into the medical image. A comparison of performance with related works previously reported in the literature is included.