Pixel-based dispersal scheme for medical image survivability and confidentiality

Abstract

Medical image survivability and confidentiality is an important concern for digital medical image storing in healthcare institution. Survivability issue arises when a storage server goes down due to unexpected disasters whilst medical image confidentiality issue arises due to disclosed data by third party on a conventional storage. This study explores secret sharing threshold scheme: Rabin's IDA, and Shamir's SSA, as potential approaches to address these issues. Currently, these schemes are widely known for providing data survivability and confidentiality in other fields. However, the aim of this project is to apply these secret sharing schemes through MIaDPACS to provide survivability and confidentiality on digital medical image. Pixels are extracted from the image, encoded and dispersed using Rabin's IDA into distributed storages. In addition, the secret key used in Rabin's IDA is also dispersed through Shamir's SSA. To reconstruct back the original image, it only requires a subset of the dispersed files with numbers equals to a threshold defined during dispersal. Experimental results conducted have shown that MIaDPACS able to provide survivability and confidentiality for digital medical image.