Appeal No. 2001-0575
Application 08/924,867
(PACS) is used for medical images in association with a digital trust center for enabling
authentication of the image information. In order to protect the confidentiality of the information
and determine the authenticity of digital images, cryptographic techniques have been integrated
with PACS. By employing a digital trust center, an authentication server is provided to attach a
hash value, i.e., a “digital fingerprint,” derived from the image data set to an incoming image
dataset so that the hash is stored with the image data set in the image data store maintained by the
PACS archive server. The PACS archive server can check the authenticity of the image data set
by comparing the stored hash with one it computes from the stored image data set.
In order to reduce vulnerability of such a system to attack or a comprise of authenticity
and security, the invention provides “in association with an image management system, an
authentication and security system comprising an authentication server or so-called “digital trust
center” which maintains and stores hashes and corresponding time stamps indicating the times of
receipt of the respective hashes, and provides them on request in encrypted form, and further
functionality in the image acquisition computers and the display stations to provide for security
and to interact with the authentication server for authentication purposes” [specification-page 4].
Independent claim 1 is reproduced as follows:
1. In an image management system comprising image acquisition computers for
acquiring image information from imaging devices associated with the image acquisition
computers and forming image datasets, each comprising an image header and image data, an
image archive server for receiving the image datasets from the acquisition computers and
maintaining at least one image data store for the image datasets, and a plurality of remote display
stations for displaying images from requested image datasets which are retrieved by the image
archive server from the image data store and sent to the requesting display station, an
authentication and security system comprising:
2
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