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Author Spotlight: An Efficient and Robust Software for Automated Fusion of Multiple Preclinical Imaging Modalities
Published on: October 27, 2023
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Reversible medical image cryptography using spatial XOR-rotation and chaos-driven permutation and diffusion schemes
Dola Sundeep1, Kovuri Umadevi2, Bhagya Prasad Bugge3
1Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing (IIITDM), Jagannathagattu Hill,, Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, 518008, India. sundeepdola@gmail.com.
Scientific Reports
|March 7, 2026
Summary
Two new lightweight encryption methods, SPiRAL and CHRONEX, provide secure medical image handling for telemedicine and cloud diagnostics. These reversible ciphers offer high statistical security without computational burdens.
Area of Science:
- Medical Imaging and Cybersecurity
- Applied Cryptography
- Health Informatics
Background:
- The increasing use of telemedicine, cloud diagnostics, and picture archiving systems necessitates secure medical image handling.
- Existing medical image encryption methods are often computationally intensive, hindering their use on resource-constrained devices.
- There is a need for lightweight, reversible encryption schemes suitable for clinical workflows.
Purpose of the Study:
- To design and evaluate two novel, lightweight, and fully reversible image encryption schemes for medical images.
- To address the limitations of existing computationally heavy encryption algorithms.
- To ensure practical implementation for end-to-end clinical workflows.
Main Methods:
- Developed two complementary symmetric ciphers operating directly in the pixel domain: SPiRAL (Spatial Pixel-wise Rotation and XOR-based) and CHRONEX (Chaotic Reordering and Nonlinear XOR).
- SPiRAL utilizes chained XOR operations, index-dependent rotations, and a key-driven permutation mask.
- CHRONEX employs coupled logistic maps for key-dependent permutation and S-box-based XOR diffusion.
Main Results:
- Both SPiRAL and CHRONEX achieved high statistical security, with entropy values above 7.999 bits.
- Cipher images exhibited high Number of Pixels Change Rate (NPCR) and Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), with minimal neighbour correlation.
- The CHRONEX scheme demonstrated superior randomness and differential robustness compared to existing techniques.
- Exact recovery of original images was guaranteed, ensuring full reversibility.
Conclusions:
- Lightweight pixel-domain encryption schemes like SPiRAL and CHRONEX can provide robust security for medical images.
- These ciphers are practical for real-time applications and resource-constrained environments, suitable for clinical use.
- The proposed methods balance security, reversibility, and performance for modern healthcare systems.
