An efficient steganography method for hiding patient confidential information.

Abstract

This paper deals with the important issue of security and confidentiality of patient information when exchanging or storing medical images. Steganography has recently been viewed as an alternative or complement to cryptography, as existing cryptographic systems are not perfect due to their vulnerability to certain types of attack. We propose in this paper a new steganography algorithm for hiding patient confidential information. It utilizes Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) to identify contrast regions in the image and a Hamming code that embeds 3 secret message bits into 4 bits of the cover image. In order to preserve the content of the region of interest (ROI), the embedding is only performed using the Region of Non-Interest (RONI).