An efficient reversible and secure patient data hiding algorithm for E-healthcare

Abstract

E-healthcare requires communication of patient report to a specialized doctor in a real time scenario. Therefore, any harm to patient medical data can lead to a faulty diagnosis that can be lethal for the patient. To ensure safe and secure communication in E-healthcare framework, an efficient reversible data hiding algorithm in encrypted domain has been proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm gives a higher embedding rate by embedding a single bit of patient data in $base_2$ numeral framework at every pixel of the cover image without any occurrence of underflow and overflow problem. The proposed method has been evaluated for content authentication by subjecting it to various image processing attacks. The experimental study reveals that for test images, proposed method has higher embedding rate than the compared methods, precisely recover patient information with an average value of Peak Signal Noise Ratio value of 48.13 dB between the cover image and stego image respectively. A comparison of the observed results with that of some state-of-art methods shows that proposed method performs better and as such is an ideal candidate for content authentication of Electronic patient information in a typical E-healthcare framework.