A Digital Watermarking Based Authentication Scheme for the Prevention of Medical Identity Theft in Healthcare Sector

Muktar Yahuza; M. A Musa; Bashir Saleh Maina

Muktar Yahuza
M. A Musa
Bashir Saleh Maina

Abstract

The modern type of healthcare is evolving with advances in technology. The latest developments of the technology are now electronic medical records and sensor networks integrated to track the in-home medical over the internet. And as such, there is a need to eliminate the security issue associated with data over the internet. This is because of any modifications to medical records may have a detrimental impact on the patient. A digital watermarking is proposed in this work which will detect any attempt to modify patient data. Before the embedding process, a discrete wavelet transformation is created with 8*8 non-overlapping medical test image blocks. A 64-bit binary number, the equivalent of the patient entry date numbers and the file ID embedded in the respective patient's medical image by quantizing the coefficient of each row of the highest frequency components. The watermark is extracted after the medical image is moved to its desired destination for authentication check and comparison with the original watermark. The mean value of the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) that indicates the level of imperceptibility is found to be 82,88 dB, moreover, the mean square error values that indicate the level of distortion of the watermarked image is 7.9e-4. The watermarked image was subjected to several attacks, and each was identified by the proposed scheme. Consequently, the proposed scheme allows for the simple and excellent identification capability of any changes made to the medical image.

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