Lossless ROI Watermarking of Medical Images

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目的目标是开发创新的无损感兴趣区域（ROI）水印技术，使医学图像的使用，存档和通信更加安全和可管理。目前可用的技术仅提供不适用于大多数医学图像的普遍存在的水印的手段。所提出的技术提供了一种有效的手段，数据认证，安全性和版权保护，通过嵌入不可感知的水印到图像中，而不修改的ROI的内容。这些水印在复制、互联网传输甚至一些更改后仍然存在，并且可以在需要时检索。重要的信息，如标本识别，实验室签名和规格可以编码到水印。该功能将使临床医生和研究人员能够有效地保护其数字图像数据的真实性和完整性。 在第一阶段，我们将研究无损感兴趣区域水印的可行性，简单的模态医学图像。我们将开发一个原型系统来实现所提出的水印方法。我们将开发一种图像分割方法，该方法基于ROI描绘来处理和跟踪图像区域的分区和位置。结合区域分割，我们将实现一个空间域和小波域水印方案的改进，使选择性水印到图像的非ROI部分，并使用单帧单色医学图像进行测试。我们将评估这些方案的水印（1）不可感知性，（2）容量，（3）鲁棒性。如果所提出的技术被证明是可行的，那么在第二阶段，该技术将扩展到复杂模态医学图像并进行测试。当完全开发后，我们将为新技术申请专利，并通过与医疗成像系统制造商和通用图像处理和出版软件产品公司的许可协议和合作伙伴关系将其商业化。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to develop innovative lossless regions-of-interest (ROI) watermarking techniques to make the usage, archiving, and communication of medical images much more secure and manageable. Currently available techniques only provide means of ubiquitous watermarking that are inapplicable to most medical images. The proposed technology offers an effective means of data authentication, security, and copyright protection by embedding imperceptible watermarks into the images without modifying the content of the ROI. These watermarks remain present after copying, internet transmission, or even some alteration, and can be retrieved when needed. Important information such as specimen identification, laboratory signature and specification can be encoded into the watermarks. This functionality will enable clinicians and researchers to effectively protect the authenticity and integrity of their digital image data. In Phase 1 we will study the feasibility of lossless ROI watermarking on simple modality medical images. We will develop a prototype system to implement the proposed watermarking approach. We will develop an image segmentation method that processes and keeps track of the partition and location of the image regions based on the ROI delineation. In conjunction with the region segmentation, we will implement both a spatial-domain and a wavelet-domain watermarking schemes with the improvement to enable selective watermarking into non-ROI parts of the images, and to test them using single-frame monochrome medical images. We will evaluate these schemes in terms of watermark (1) imperceptibility, (2) capacity, and (3) robustness. If the proposed technique proves to be viable, in Phase 2 the technology will be extended to and tested on complex modality medical images. When fully developed, we will patent the new technology and commercialize it through licensing agreements and partnerships with manufacturers of medical imaging systems and companies of general image processing and publishing software products.