Concealing Secret Data in Medical Images Based on Even/Odd Pixels and PSO Algorithm for Improve Steganography System

Nowadays, concealing massive secret healthcare data has become an urgent necessity due to the speed of evolution in information technology and communication, especially in terms of security. Concealing is one of the important techniques used to address the security issue. The concealing technology in the medical image is called the steganography system. Different medical images can used within the steganography system such as Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. The new method has been utilized to embed patients' records (secret data) in medical images. The suggested method consisted of different steps and contributions. The first step is related to data preparation for both medical images and secret data. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been used during the image preparation to locate the perfect pixels for the embedding process. In addition, the Huffman algorithm has been used during the secret data preparation to compress the secret data. Secondly, the proposed Even/Odd pixel distribution method was utilized to hide the secret patients' records. In this research, the Region of Interest (RoI) is the most reliable area used to embed data while we ignore the level of single-color areas. Three types of standard datasets were used in this paper. This research demonstrated notable achievements in terms of imperceptibility and security, which may be attributed to the careful selection of appropriate methods and algorithms for certain contexts.