Analysis of the impact of digital watermarking on computer-aided diagnosis in medical imaging

• Published in: Computers in biology and medicine Vol. 68; pp. 37 - 48
• Main Authors: Garcia-Hernandez, Jose Juan, Gomez-Flores, Wilfrido, Rubio-Loyola, Javier
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2016; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Algorithms; Breast - pathology; Breast ultrasound; Computer-aided diagnosis; Confidentiality; Data security; Electronic health records; Female; Humans; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Internal Medicine; Medical imaging; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Other; Segmentation; Tumors; Ultrasonic imaging; Ultrasonography, Mammary - methods; Watermarking; Data security; Segmentation; Breast ultrasound; Computer-aided diagnosis; Watermarking
• ISSN: 0010-4825; 1879-0534
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2015.10.014

Medical images (MI) are relevant sources of information for detecting and diagnosing a large number of illnesses and abnormalities. Due to their importance, this study is focused on breast ultrasound (BUS), which is the main adjunct for mammography to detect common breast lesions among women worldwide. On the other hand, aiming to enhance data security, image fidelity, authenticity, and content verification in e-health environments, MI watermarking has been widely used, whose main goal is to embed patient meta-data into MI so that the resulting image keeps its original quality. In this sense, this paper deals with the comparison of two watermarking approaches, namely spread spectrum based on the discrete cosine transform (SS-DCT) and the high-capacity data-hiding (HCDH) algorithm, so that the watermarked BUS images are guaranteed to be adequate for a computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) system, whose two principal outcomes are lesion segmentation and classification. Experimental results show that HCDH algorithm is highly recommended for watermarking medical images, maintaining the image quality and without introducing distortion into the output of CADx. •A deep and detailed analysis of watermarking implications on CADx was carried out.•A procedure to evaluate the impact of watermarking on CADx was proposed.•The diagnosis in breast ultrasound imaging is guaranteed by the HCDH algorithm.