Blockchain-Based Reversible Data Hiding for Securing Medical Images

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Information Security
• Data Encryption

Background:

• Medical images are crucial for diagnosis but vulnerable to malicious attacks during communication.
• Existing reversible data hiding on encrypted images (RDHEI) schemes have limitations in embedding capacity and lack integrity/traceability mechanisms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an improved RDHEI scheme with higher embedding capacity for medical images.
• To enhance the integrity and traceability of medical images using a blockchain-based system.

Main Methods:

• A novel approach combining image block-wise encryption and histogram shifting for RDHEI.
• Implementation of a blockchain-based system to store private information and image hashes for traceability.

Main Results:

• The proposed RDHEI scheme achieves an embedding rate exceeding 0.8 bpp for typical medical images.
• The blockchain system provides robust integrity verification and traceability for all communicated medical images.

Conclusions:

• The novel RDHEI method significantly increases embedding capacity, addressing limitations of previous schemes.
• The integration of blockchain technology ensures secure, traceable, and verifiable communication of sensitive medical data.