When dealing with patients' sensitive medical records, it's always important how one also deals with medical images that should also be kept private. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability initiated on April 14, 2013 by the federal government, establishes all relevant standards to address the issue of privacy protection. The HIPAA requires for integrity and confidentiality in all of current, previous and future from hospitals, doctors, and other relevant professionals.
In an era where digital technology has become of major importance, there is a series of medical images that can now be kept in digital format and become quite easy to retrieve, store and preserve.
Watermarking – An Essential Aspect for the Protection of Medical Images
A. Ethical reasons and relevant legislation define Medical Information Assurance & Watermarking Medical directions. USA's HIPAA and Europe's EC 95/46 Directive are the major legislations defining relevant directions. When dealing with medical information records, thus, which involve a series of clinical examinations, diagnoses, and EPR images, three major security attributes should be considered:
• Confidentiality: only authorised users can view and evaluate medical information;
• Availability: Scheduled accessing periods should be set when entering the information system containing the medical data;
• Reliability: The information should be examined by authorised people and not changed by unauthorised ones. Additionally, it’s important for a proof to exist that there is a direct link between the patient and his/her corresponding medical information and nothing else that could change this connection should interfere.
Medical Information Systems (MIS) secure that the above named attributes exist by adopting five relevant security principles: availability, integrity, confidentiality, authentication, and non-repudiation. Confidentiality and Integrity availability refer, more or less, to the same