Enhancing Healthcare Security with Chaotic Reversible Watermarking for Medical Images

Abstract

The implementation and advancement of digital technologies in medicine have sparked a technical revolution, leading to new developments across various medical fields. Ensuring the confidentiality of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and maintaining patient privacy are critical security requirements for healthcare systems. In today’s digitally connected world, malicious tampering of digital images has become increasingly common, representing a serious violation of intellectual property rights. Consequently, protecting images by establishing rightful ownership has become a priority. Reversible watermarking (RW) techniques offer a promising alternative to conventional watermarking systems, particularly for safeguarding highly sensitive images. It is crucial to authenticate the source and origin of medical images and associated patient information to ensure they correspond to the correct patient. This work presents a method for protecting medical images and patient-related information in healthcare using a chaotic reversible watermarking technique. The performance of this method is evaluated using metrics such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).