In the age of digital technology, medical images play an important role in the healthcare industry, which aids surgeons in making precise decisions and reducing the diagnosis time. However, the storage of large amounts of these images in third-party cloud services raises privacy and security concerns. There are a lot of classical security mechanisms to protect them. Although, the advent of quantum computing entails the development of quantum-based encryption models for healthcare. There is a significant demand for resource-efficient, quantum-secure image encryption mechanisms that leverage existing classical infrastructure. Hence, in this paper, a novel quantum chaos-based encryption scheme for medical images has been introduced. The model utilizes bit-plane scrambling, a 3D quantum logistic map, quantum operations in the diffusion phase, a hybrid chaotic map, and DNA encoding in the confusion phase to transform the plain medical image into a cipher medical image. The proposed scheme has been evaluated using multiple statistical analyses and validated against more attacks such as differential attacks, known and chosen plaintext attacks with three different medical datasets, and theoretically, as well. Hence, the introduced encryption model has proved to be more attack-resistant and robust than other existing image encryption schemes, ensuring the secure storage of medical images in cloud environments.
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