Paperless Transfer of Medical Images: Storing Patient Data in Medical Images

Abstract

Medical images have become an integral part of
patient diagnosis in recent years. With the introduction of Health
Information Management Systems (HIMS) used for the storage
and sharing of patient data, as well as the use of the Picture
Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) for
manipulating and storage of CT Scans, X-rays, MRIs and other
medical images, the security of patient data has become a serious
concern for medical professionals. The secure transfer of these
images along with patient data is necessary for maintaining
confidentiality as required by the Data Protection Act, 2011 in
Trinidad and Tobago and similar legislation worldwide. To
facilitate this secure transfer, different digital watermarking and
steganography techniques have been proposed to safely hide
information in these digital images. This paper focuses on the
amount of data that can be embedded into typical medical images
without compromising visual quality. In addition, Exploiting
Modification Direction (EMD) is selected as the method of choice
for hiding information in medical images and it is compared to
the commonly used Least Significant Bit (LSB) method.
Preliminary results show that by using EMD there little to no
distortion even at the highest embedding capacity.