Privacy Preservation of Medical Health Records using Symmetric Block Cipher and Frequency Domain Watermarking Techniques

Digital watermarking is a growing paradigm in information science and communication systems that can be applied in the medical field. In general, a digital watermark is a mechanism for protecting digital information's copyright. Various algorithms have been developed till date to implement watermarking in order to safeguard data. The Discrete Cosine Transform is one such well-known algorithm (DCT). This algorithm is a frequency domain technique that provides security against attacks. ECG signals can also be compressed using DCT in electrocardiography. The proposed method primarily focuses on the application of digital watermarking techniques on patient medical records. The solution's goal is to preserve patients' medical records by integrating them in their MRI scan reports. As a result, the attacker will only be able to see the MRI scan report, while the health information will be buried. Singular value decomposition is used to compress the MRI scan report in this case (SVD). The medical health record, on the other hand, is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, and the cipher picture obtained is employed in the embedding procedure. The DCT technique is used to embed the compressed MRI scan (cover image) and cipher image (watermark image). The embedded medical health record can be extracted by reverse application of DCT. The extracted cipher image is then decrypted using AES decryption algorithm. The produced watermark image’s (health record) quality is then assessed using a set of standards referred to as the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Square Error (MSE).