Secure management of DICOM images via reversible data hiding, contrast enhancement and visible-imperceptible watermarking

This paper proposes a novel algorithm that fuses visible-imperceptible watermarking and reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement to improve the medical image management in terms of avoid detachment between data of an electronic patient record and its corresponding medical image as well as authentication to identify the image source. Medical data management has progressed due to the advances in communication and information technologies. Scientific literature reports several methods for contribute to the improvement of medical image management, many of these based on watermarking and reversible data hiding. The choice either one or the other depends on the application and requirements. The proposed method employs visible-imperceptible watermarking, to conceal in an imperceptible manner a set of watermarks in the spatial domain to perform authentication revealing its content by a naked eye via a contrast enhancement provided by a reversible data hiding technique that the same time hide medical data into the watermark logos to perform the tasks to avoid detachment. The above operations are invertible and can be used on demand, either for obtain a clear image to the medical diagnosis or for obtain a protected image to improve its use. Experimental results show the contribution of the proposed scheme and its efficiency regarding medical image management in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. The efficiency of the proposed method was confirmed by performing several experiments comparing its performance with current state-of-the-art works. Our proposal preserves the native DICOM format with its original grayscale resolution.