title: Analysis of the impact of digital watermarking on computer-aided diagnosis in medical imaging.
abstract: Medical images (MI) are relevant sources of information for detecting and diagnosing a large number of illnesses and abnormalities. Due to their importance, this study is focused on breast ultrasound (BUS), which is the main adjunct for mammography to detect common breast lesions among women worldwide. On the other hand, aiming to enhance data security, image fidelity, authenticity, and content verification in e-health environments, MI watermarking has been widely used, whose main goal is to embed patient meta-data into MI so that the resulting image keeps its original quality. In this sense, this paper deals with the comparison of two watermarking approaches, namely spread spectrum based on the discrete cosine transform (SS-DCT) and the high-capacity data-hiding (HCDH) algorithm, so that the watermarked BUS images are guaranteed to be adequate for a computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) system, whose two principal outcomes are lesion segmentation and classification. Experimental results show that HCDH algorithm is highly recommended for watermarking medical images, maintaining the image quality and without introducing distortion into the output of CADx.
authors.affiliation: Technology Information Laboratory, Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Electronic address: jjuan@tamps.cinvestav.mx.
authors.forename: Jose Juan
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Garcia-Hernandez
authors.affiliation: Technology Information Laboratory, Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Electronic address: wgomez@tamps.cinvestav.mx.
authors.forename: Wilfrido
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Gomez-Flores
authors.affiliation: Technology Information Laboratory, Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Electronic address: jrubio@tamps.cinvestav.mx.
authors.forename: Javier
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rubio-Loyola
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001940:Breast / Q000473:pathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D016217:Ultrasonography, Mammary / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Breast ultrasound; Computer-aided diagnosis; Data security; Segmentation; Watermarking