Enhancing Medical Data Security in E-Health Systems Using Biometric-Based Watermarking

Abstract

In the field of Electronic Health (e-Health), Electronic Health Records (EHR) are transmitted between health professionals using e-Health systems for cooperative medical practice, medical monitoring, telemedical expertise, and telemedical imaging. Medical images are a crucial component of EHR and are used in various aspects of telemedicine systems such as expertise, consultation, teaching, and research. However, protecting the authenticity and copyrights of medical images is essential to prevent duplication, modification, or unauthorized distribution. This paper proposes a robust medical image copyright protection method that uses patient palm-print template as watermark and Lorenz chaotic map for template concealing and selecting the appropriate embedding positions in medical images. The novelty of the method lies in optimizing the expected number of modifications per pixel of the medical images after being watermarked. Experimental results indicate that this approach has a high performance with a genuine accept rate of 99.86% and can withstand various image processing attacks, including Gaussian noise, compression, and image rotations, while ensuring personal data security during telemedicine data exchange.