Storage and transmission of cardiac data with medical images

Abstract

The landscape of healthcare delivery and medical data management has significantly changed over the last years, as a result of the significant advancements in information and communication technologies. Complementary and/or alternative solutions are needed to meet the new challenges, especially regarding security of the widely distributed sensitive medical information. Digital watermarking is a technique of hiding specific identification data for copyright authentication. The DICOM standard is one method to include demographic information, such as patient information and X-ray exposure facilities, in image data. The DICOM standard is a standard that can be used regularly to record demographic information onto the image data header section. Regarding DICOM format images, information on patients and X-ray exposure facilities can be obtained easily from them. On the other hand, general-purpose image formats, such as the JPEG format, offer no standard that can be used regularly to record demographic information onto the header section. Digital watermark technologies [1-8] can be used to embed demographic information in image data. Digital watermarking have several other uses, such as fingerprinting, authentication, integrity verification purposes, content labeling, usage control and content protection [9, 10]. The efficient utilization of bandwidth of communication channel and storage space can be achieved, when the reduction in data size is done. Recently, Giakoumaki et al, have presented a review of research in the area of medical-oriented watermarking and proposed a wavelet-based multiple watermarking scheme. This scheme aimed to address critical health information management issues, including origin and data authentication, protection of sensitive data, and image archiving and retrieval [11]. Their experimental results on different medical imaging modalities demonstrated the efficiency and transparency of the watermarking scheme. The digital watermarking technique is adapted in this chapter for interleaving patient information with medical images, to reduce storage and transmission overheads. The text data is encrypted before interleaving with images to ensure greater security. The graphical signals are compressed and subsequently interleaved with the image. Differential pulse code modulation and adaptive delta modulation techniques are employed for data compression as well as encryption and results are tabulated for a specific example. Adverse effects of channel induced random errors and burst errors on the text data are countered by employing repetition code, Hamming code and R-S code techniques.