Secure Transmission and Repository Platform for Electronic Medical Images: Case Study of Retinal Fundus in Teleophthalmology

Abstract

Securing electronic medical information has a significant impact on data access which directly affects patient’s privacy and quality care rights. Medical professionals need to have full access to all patients' medical history to make accurate decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment plans. This paper introduces a novel Secure framework that integrates a new hybrid encryption scheme of medical images using chaotic maps and 2D Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) Steganography to increase key size and achieve high security level. In addition, a web-based monitoring platform has been deployed for tracking of electronic medical records during transmission. To validate the efficiency of the proposed framework, an application case-study has been introduced for securely transmitting retinal fundus medical images for diagnostic decisions on diabetic patients. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed framework demonstrated the ability to mask the context of the confidential patient into a transmitted cover image with high imperceptibility and limited degradation in the stego image provided in acceptable cryptographic overhead. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework outperforms other schemes in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and perceptibility.