Reinforcement of Medical Image Security Through Steganography and Encryption Techniques

Patients' data is stored in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for confidentiality purposes. However, the insecure networks of hospitals and clinics puts patient information at risk. To address this ethical issue, secure communication is crucial. The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard governs the transmission of EHRs to maintain data integrity and confidentiality. This paper combines cryptography and steganography techniques to transmit medical information and images across hospital networks, securely. The introduced framework comprises encryption of patients' data using DNA-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), hiding the information within images using Least Significant Bit (LSB) embedding, compressing the stego images using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and reversal of the process at the receiver end. Simulation experiments demonstrate that this framework comprising both encryption and steganography outperforms existing methods in securing the medical data.