An efficient lossless secret sharing scheme for medical images

Abstract

Medical doctors use diagnostic imaging techniques such as X-rays, CT scans and MRI, for detecting diseases or narrowing down possible causes of pain. This often require sharing and transmitting medical images over public channels. In this work we adapt Shamir’s secret sharing paradigm to propose a novel lossless scheme for secure sharing of medical images. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the redundancy in typical medical images to reduce share sizes, and hence facilitate storing and sharing. To this end, we employ a customized run-length encoding method to compress the medical image. We conduct an extensive performance analysis on the proposed scheme, including a comparison with some existing Shamir-type secret image sharing schemes.