  Nowadays, with the development of public network usage, medical information
is transmitted throughout the hospitals. The watermarking system can help for
the confidentiality of medical information distributed over the internet. In
medical images, regions-of-interest (ROI) contain diagnostic information. The
watermark should be embedded only into non-regions-of-interest (NROI) to keep
diagnostic information without distortion. Recently, ROI based watermarking has
attracted the attention of the medical research community. The ROI map can be
used as an embedding key for improving confidentiality protection purposes.
However, in most existing works, the ROI map that is used for the embedding
process must be sent as side-information along with the watermarked image. This
side information is a disadvantage and makes the extraction process non-blind.
Also, most existing algorithms do not recover NROI of the original cover image
after the extraction of the watermark. In this paper, we propose a framework
for blind diagnostically-lossless watermarking, which iteratively embeds only
into NROI. The significance of the proposed framework is in satisfying the
confidentiality of the patient information through a blind watermarking system,
while it preserves diagnostic/medical information of the image throughout the
watermarking process. A deep neural network is used to recognize the ROI map in
the embedding, extraction, and recovery processes. In the extraction process,
the same ROI map of the embedding process is recognized without requiring any
additional information. Hence, the watermark is blindly extracted from the
NROI.
