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Authenticable medical image-sharing scheme based on embedded small shadow QR code and blockchain framework

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Abstract

In the field of medical image content protection and security sharing, the introduction of blockchain technology has a problem in that the secret key may be lost and cannot be recovered. Therefore, this paper proposes an authenticable medical image-sharing scheme based on an embedded small shadow QR code and a blockchain framework. First, a small shadow image is obtained by employing a secret image-sharing method based on the Chinese remainder theorem. Then, the shadow image is embedded into a QR code with error correction. This not only ensures the security and integrity of the shadow image transmission in the public channel but also avoids the problem where the secret key is lost and cannot be recovered. Compared with some existing excellent schemes, our scheme adopts a hash bit stream for authentication purposes and employs smart contracts to authenticate and restore secret images, thus reducing the local load. In addition, experiments validate that the recovered secret medical image is lossless and that the cover QR code is more robust and secure. This method is suitable for medical image content protection and security sharing.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Training Program for Academic and Technical Leaders of Jiangxi Province (Grant no. 20204BCJL23036), the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 61961022, 62201233, 61906079), and Postdoctoral Research Project of Jiangxi Province (Grant no. 2020KY14).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, 330013, China

    Wenying Wen, Yunpeng Jian, Yuming Fang & Baolin Qiu

  2. School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210000, China

    Yushu Zhang

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Contributions

WW: writing-original draft; YJ: data curation; formal analysis; YF: project administration; YZ: methodology, software; BQ: writing-review and editing.

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Correspondence to Yuming Fang.

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Wen, W., Jian, Y., Fang, Y. et al. Authenticable medical image-sharing scheme based on embedded small shadow QR code and blockchain framework. Multimedia Systems 29, 831–845 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-022-00999-3

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