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Top1. Introduction
The world has witnessed an improvement in human healthcare conditions in recent years, due to continuous technological advances to improve patient safety by identifying early patient risks. However, healthcare organizations are aware of technologies when it comes to unauthorized access across unsecured networks. Disruption of health status may violate the confidentiality of sensitive secret information.
Digital watermarking techniques have emerged in recent years to contribute on security issues regarding confidentiality and integrity of medical images. A watermark can be embedded into a host image (Singh et al., 2019) to ensure image protection, content authentication, and integrity (Molina-Garcia et al., 2020; Akhtarkavan et al., 2020). Image watermarking can be classified as robust, semi-fragile, or fragile (Liu et al., 2019; Hsu et al., 2020; Ortiz et al., 2019). The robust approaches are often used for ownership proofing where the embedded watermark should be super tough against any attempt to delete it (Nejati et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2017). In semi-fragile approaches, the watermark must deal with at least minor attacks (Hurrah et al., 2020), unlike fragile approaches where the watermark is braked after undergoing any operation (Prasad et al., 2020). Fragile and semi-fragile techniques can be used for data integrity and authenticity (Yu et al., 2019; Borah et al., 2020). Additionally, the image watermarking techniques could be classified as blind (Li et al., 2020), where the receiver could extract the embedded watermark without requiring the original watermark or the host image, Semi-blind (Horng et al., 2014) and non-blind (Li et al., 2020) where respectively the embedded watermark, host image are required to extract the watermark.
Several watermarking methods have been proposed (Haghighi et al., 2019; Molina-Garcia et al., 2020; Akhtarkavan et al., 2020; Hurrah et al., 2020; Gull et al., 2020; Bhalerao et al., 2020). Each one has its advantages and drawbacks. The study and analysis of several methods have indicated that they should be used in a secure and imperceptible manner with low computational complexity. At the same time, the receiver could check if the embedded watermarked image was altered during transmission. In healthcare, any alteration on the image content presents a serious concern due to the sensitive information in medical images; even a smooth alteration will incite incorrect interpretation from the physician. Medical images have specific features compared to other kind of images such as: less texture. We need to constantly consider the importance of each pixel in medical interpretation to achieve correct medical interpretation.