Reversible data hiding for electronic patient information security for telemedicine applications

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Information Security
• Telemedicine

Background:

• Secure transmission of medical images is crucial for telemedicine.
• Maintaining diagnostic integrity during data transmission is essential.
• Existing methods may compromise image quality or reversibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images (RDH-EI) scheme for telemedicine.
• To ensure secure transmission of medical images with exact recovery.
• To improve the payload-distortion trade-off in encrypted medical images.

Main Methods:

• Developed a Generation of Encryption Parameters (GEP) mechanism for block-wise embedding controls.
• Implemented a two-level Least Significant Bit (LSB) strategy for separable payload extraction and recovery.
• Utilized AES-CTR encryption with a unique nonce for image security.

Main Results:

• Achieved higher image quality on directly decrypted images compared to baselines (PSNR > 37 dB, SSIM > 0.96).
• Demonstrated bit-exact image recovery (PSNR = ∞).
• Ensured encryption robustness with high entropy, NPCR (>99%), and UACI (~33%).

Conclusions:

• The proposed GEP-driven, two-level embedding scheme enhances the payload-distortion trade-off.
• The method provides strict reversibility and secure medical image sharing capabilities.
• This approach is suitable for telemedicine applications requiring high security and diagnostic integrity.