Secure and Reversible Medical Image Watermarking for E-Healthcare Applications
K. M. Nandhini, R.H. Rajkumar · 2025
E-healthcare and mobile healthcare technologies have become increasingly important for efficient healthcare delivery in recent years due to the pandemic's needs for real-time data interchange. The electronic transfer of patient health records, including imaging reports, is made possible by the growing public networks connecting diagnostic labs and hospitals. However, this strategy is unsafe since outside attacks on public networks can expose private health information, leading to inaccurate diagnoses and treatments. To overcome such challenges, methods such as Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) and data encoding are employed to safeguard patient identities and identify instances of tampering. Data security is crucial because outsourcing patient records and medical reports to servers exposes them to modification and illegal access. This study presents a new reversible watermarking technique with a large payload and minimal computational expenditure. It divides the medical image into a Border Region (BR) and a Non-Border Region (NBR). A pseudorandom key encrypts the Electronic Patient Record (EPR), which is incorporated in the image after the NBR has been upscaled using Neighbor Mean Interpolation (NMI). The technique, which incorporates both local and global tamper detection, produces remarkable results with robustness against a range of threats and an average PSNR of 61.14 dB with average embedding and extraction times of 0.88 and 0.83 seconds, respectively, the approach is incredibly secure and effective, demonstrating its efficacy in comparison to contemporary, widely used techniques.