Abstract
In recent years, several countries have increasingly promoted digital health to improve medical care quality and precision medicine. Concerns such as how to employ and manage medical data, including physiological signals and medical images, have emerged as one of the core issues in eHealth. The National Health Insurance of Taiwan has gradually generated cross-hospital medical image databases since the year 2018, including lung cancer, brain tumor, breast tumor, liver tumor, and coronary arterial diseases. Digitized medical image data can be stored in cloud databases or be transmitted via computer networks or wireless transmissions. However, patient confidentiality and transmission infosecurity are serious concerns in public channels or spaces, which raises the question of how to prevent data from being stolen, tampered, or peeked after receipt by unauthorized people. Hence, infosecurity has become an important issue in the digital era. This study proposes hash transformation with multi-secret keys and an optimization-based controller to engage a novel cryptographic method to encrypt and decrypt digital medical images in a health information system. Both the gradient descent (GD) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based controllers are implemented to search the decryption key parameters. For a case study in breast elastography and X-ray images consisting of 150 benign tumors and 150 malignant tumors, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is used to evaluate the similarity of two images between the original images and the decrypted images. Conclusively, the PSO-based controller performed better than the GD-based controller and traditional cryptographic methods in terms of recovery reliability.
Highlights
In recent years, some countries across the world have actively promoted digital health to improve the diagnostic efficiency and accuracy for effectively employing and managing medical data; including physiological signals, medical images, and treatment records
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION This section describes the results of the experiments conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed cryptographic methods for infosecurity in a health information system, including (1) the image encryption process with hash transformation and secret security key, (2) the image decryption process with optimization-based controller, and (3) the image quality validation
A digital medical imaging cryptographic method based on hash transformation and optimization-based controller was proposed in this study
Summary
Some countries across the world have actively promoted digital health to improve the diagnostic efficiency and accuracy for effectively employing and managing medical data; including physiological signals, medical images, and treatment records. Ultrasound elastography, B-mode ultrasound imaging, and acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) elastography [5]–[7] are common initial breast imaging modalities (first-line examination) for screening benign and malignant breast tumors in women aged 30–39 years. This method can produce tissue compressions and generate a qualitative 2D image for evaluating the unknown tissue stiffness or strain, which produces chain compressions to the tissue using an impulsive, harmonic, and steady-state radiation force excitation [8]–[12]. The ARFI–VTI image can be used to locate the lesion contours using an image processing algorithm for further needle biopsy and guiding aspirations; it can use textures and grayscales to distinguish benign tumors from malignant tumors [12], [16], [17]
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