Earticle

Healthcare institution that handles a number of patients, opinions is often sought from different experts. It demands the exchange of the medical history of the patient among the experts which includes the medical images, prescriptions and electronic patient records (EPR) etc. In order to reduce storage and transmission cost, data hiding techniques are used to embed patient information with medical images. In medical imaging applications, there are stringent constraints on image fidelity that strictly prohibit any permanent image distortion by the watermarking or data hiding. Authenticity is another important aspect in medical image watermarking. This paper proposed modified difference expansion watermarking using LSB replacement in the difference of virtual border for data hiding in medical images. The Class Dependent Coding Scheme (CDCS) is used to encode the EPR data so that embedding capacity can be increased. The image hash is calculated using MD5 to provide authentication. Experimental results show that proposed scheme provide us large data hiding capacities along with very high PSNR values as compared to earlier EPR data hiding techniques.