Pathology-Aware Adaptive Watermarking for Text-Driven Medical Image Synthesis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Chanyoung, Ju, Dayun, Kim, Jinyeong, Han, Woojung, Alcover-Couso, Roberto, Hwang, Seong Jae
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kim, Chanyoung
Ju, Dayun
Kim, Jinyeong
Han, Woojung
Alcover-Couso, Roberto
Hwang, Seong Jae
author_facet Kim, Chanyoung
Ju, Dayun
Kim, Jinyeong
Han, Woojung
Alcover-Couso, Roberto
Hwang, Seong Jae
contents As recent text-conditioned diffusion models have enabled the generation of high-quality images, concerns over their potential misuse have also grown. This issue is critical in the medical domain, where text-conditioned generated medical images could enable insurance fraud or falsified records, highlighting the urgent need for reliable safeguards against unethical use. While watermarking techniques have emerged as a promising solution in general image domains, their direct application to medical imaging presents significant challenges. A key challenge is preserving fine-grained disease manifestations, as even minor distortions from a watermark may lead to clinical misinterpretation, which compromises diagnostic integrity. To overcome this gap, we present MedSign, a deep learning-based watermarking framework specifically designed for text-to-medical image synthesis, which preserves pathologically significant regions by adaptively adjusting watermark strength. Specifically, we generate a pathology localization map using cross-attention between medical text tokens and the diffusion denoising network, aggregating token-wise attention across layers, heads, and time steps. Leveraging this map, we optimize the LDM decoder to incorporate watermarking during image synthesis, ensuring cohesive integration while minimizing interference in diagnostically critical regions. Experimental results show that our MedSign preserves diagnostic integrity while ensuring watermark robustness, achieving state-of-the-art performance in image quality and detection accuracy on MIMIC-CXR and OIA-ODIR datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08346
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pathology-Aware Adaptive Watermarking for Text-Driven Medical Image Synthesis
Kim, Chanyoung
Ju, Dayun
Kim, Jinyeong
Han, Woojung
Alcover-Couso, Roberto
Hwang, Seong Jae
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
As recent text-conditioned diffusion models have enabled the generation of high-quality images, concerns over their potential misuse have also grown. This issue is critical in the medical domain, where text-conditioned generated medical images could enable insurance fraud or falsified records, highlighting the urgent need for reliable safeguards against unethical use. While watermarking techniques have emerged as a promising solution in general image domains, their direct application to medical imaging presents significant challenges. A key challenge is preserving fine-grained disease manifestations, as even minor distortions from a watermark may lead to clinical misinterpretation, which compromises diagnostic integrity. To overcome this gap, we present MedSign, a deep learning-based watermarking framework specifically designed for text-to-medical image synthesis, which preserves pathologically significant regions by adaptively adjusting watermark strength. Specifically, we generate a pathology localization map using cross-attention between medical text tokens and the diffusion denoising network, aggregating token-wise attention across layers, heads, and time steps. Leveraging this map, we optimize the LDM decoder to incorporate watermarking during image synthesis, ensuring cohesive integration while minimizing interference in diagnostically critical regions. Experimental results show that our MedSign preserves diagnostic integrity while ensuring watermark robustness, achieving state-of-the-art performance in image quality and detection accuracy on MIMIC-CXR and OIA-ODIR datasets.
title Pathology-Aware Adaptive Watermarking for Text-Driven Medical Image Synthesis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08346