Biomedical Image Integrity Check for Telemedicine Applications by Hash Embedding & Wavelet Compression

With the advent of the multimedia & information technology, the medical images play a significant role in the field of Teleconsulting, Telediagnosis & Telesurgery, where an enormous amount of medical data needs to be securely transferred over the public network, especially, in the field of Remote Telesurgery, where the surgeons and the patient are separated by miles of distances. For the network transferred image, the integrity and confidentiality is a major issue, as the tampering of the medical images, results in serious issues in diagnosis and also treatment. This paper focuses on enhancing the integrity of the network transferred biomedical data along with its lossless compression. The segmentation of the Region of Interest (ROI) of the host biomedical image and the computation of the hash digest of the ROI by the Message Digest5 (MD5) algorithm would perform the partial encryption. It is followed by the Steganography of the biomedical image with the concatenated hash digest, ROI coordinates & patient data. Finally, a Wavelet based lossless compression is performed, for the sake of bandwidth & storage space, during transmission. The extraction phase verifies the integrity of the received data by comparing the hash digests. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated by various biomedical images with its PSNR and MSE.