On the Protection of fMRI Images in Multi-domain Environments

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging provides researchers with an effective and non-invasive tool to understand cerebral functions and correlate them with brain activities. With the ever increasing diffusion of the Internet such images may be exchanged in several ways, thus allowing new research and medical services. On the other hand, ensuring the security of exchanged fMRI data becomes a main concern, due to the special characteristics arising from strict ethics, legislative and diagnostic implications. So it is very important to prevent unauthorized manipulation and misappropriation of such images. The risks are increased when dealing with open environments like the Internet. For this reason, security mechanisms which ensure protection of such data are required. In this paper we introduce a watermarking scheme explicitly designed for this kind of images. In particular, such a scheme belongs to the category of fragile reversible watermarking. The validity of this scheme has been demonstrated through testing. Finally, by using the proposed scheme, we show how to create a distributed security solution that models a multi-domain environment, for ensuring authenticity and integrity of such images.