A synthetic stegano-crypto scheme for securing multimedia medical records and their associations

The security of medical records is an important issue related to privacy and safety during storage and communication. Human errors in hospitals and medical centers are closed related with mishandling of multimedia medical records. Cryptography and steganography can offer not only information security but also secure association of multimedia records. This paper presents a new lossless synthetic methodology that combines cryptography and steganography techniques for achieving information security via encryption and information association via hiding in images. The proposed synthetic methodology merges SCAN encryption-compression-hiding, LSB (least significant bit) hiding and regional hiding with segmentation methodologies into a single information hiding and encryption methodology. The SCAN schemes are based on a 2D spatial accessing technique that can generate a very large number of permutation scanning paths. The LSB Hiding is an information hiding algorithm which is based on hiding bits of one message image into n-least significant bits of a host image. Regional hiding with segmentation is an information hiding algorithm that works by hiding pixels of one message image into the most corresponding segments of a host image. The selection of such a complex secure scheme is also driven by the need to offer a very high level security protection of private data at the time the number of undesirable attacks in the digital communication world increases exponentially.