Medical Image Transmission Using Novel Crypto-Compression Scheme

The transmission of medical records over indiscrete and open networks has caused an increase in fraud involving stealing patients’ information, owing to a lack of security over these links. An individual’s medical documents represent confidential information that demands strict protocols and security, chiefly to protect the individual’s identity. Medical image protection is a technology intended to transmit digital data and medical images securely over public networks. This paper presents some background on the different methods used to provide authentication and protection in medical information security. This work develops a secure cryptography-based medical image reclamation algorithm based on a combination of techniques: discrete cosine transform, steganography, and watermarking. The novel algorithm takes patients’ information in the form of images and uses a discrete cosine transform method with artificial intelligence and watermarking to calculate peak signal-to-noise ratio values for the images. The proposed framework uses the underlying algorithms to perform encryption and decryption of images while retaining a high peak signal-to-noise ratio value. This value is hidden using a scrambling algorithm; therefore, a unique patient password is required to access the real image. The proposed technique is demonstrated to be robust and thus able to prevent stealing of data. The results of simulation experiments are presented, and the accuracy of the new method is demonstrated by comparisons with various previously validated algorithms.