DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICAL IMAGE ENCRYPTION SYSTEM FOR SECURE IMAGE DATA TRANSFER

Abstract

In recent years, due to the rapid development of digital communication medical diagnosis and treatment procedures are emerged and we can think about the establishment of ehealth. To establish such an important electronic health recording system continuous communication between patients and doctors are inevitable where data security demands the most priority. During this communication, the most important and large diagnostic data are images acquired from numerous modalities like X-ray, MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, ultrasound, etc. Since it is essential to protect the privacy of patients’ medical records, these images should be encrypted before being digitally transmitted. Conventional encryption techniques hold some drawbacks like static keys, long computational time, recognizable patterns even after encryption, a large amount of loss in the decryption process, mandatory large key size, and so on. To resolve these issues as well as to maintain a higher security level, this thesis proposes an efficient encryption-decryption system which is a combination of two renowned methods RSA and steganography with some constructive modifications. The proposed system generates images of an unidentifiable pattern after encryption in a short amount of computational time and lossless decrypted images. Besides, this proposed method produces different keys for each image dynamically that increase the security system. The claimed performances of the system were justified using different numerical and graphical measures such as PSNR, MSE, SSIM, and histograms. The proposed method ensures lossless retrieval of the shared image while preserving a high degree of robustness and efficiency.