SMedIR: secure medical image retrieval framework with ConvNeXt-based indexing and searchable encryption in the cloud

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The security and privacy of medical images are crucial due to their sensitive nature and the potential for severe consequences from unauthorized modifications, including data breaches and inaccurate diagnoses. This paper introduces a method for lossless medical image retrieval from encrypted images stored on third-party clouds. The proposed approach employs a symmetric integrity-centric image encryption scheme, leveraging multiple chaotic maps and cryptographic hash techniques, to ensure lossless image reconstruction. Medical images are first encrypted by the image owners and converted into hashcodes encapsulating essential features using a deep hashing technique with the ConvNeXt network as the backbone in parallel. To ensure index privacy, these hashcodes are encrypted in a searchable manner. The encrypted medical images, along with a secure index, are subsequently uploaded to cloud storage. Authorized medical image users can request similar medical images for diagnostic purposes by submitting a query image, from which a search trapdoor is generated and sent to the cloud. The retrieval process involves a secure similar image search over the encrypted indexes, followed by decryption along with integrity verification of the retrieved images. The proposed method has been rigorously tested on three standard medical datasets, demonstrating an improvement of 5-20% in retrieval accuracy compared to standard baselines. Formal security analysis and experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme offers enhanced security and retrieval accuracy, making it an effective solution for the encrypted storage and secure retrieval of medical image data.