Secure transmission of medical records using high capacity steganography

Abstract

Medical records of patients are extremely sensitive information, needing uncompromising security during both storage and transmission. In addition, these records often have to be traceable to patient medical data such as X-ray or scan (CAT, MRI etc.) images. While numerous security tools that encrypt the information and prevent unauthorized access to the data exist, the possibility of hiding the very existence of these records, using image steganography, is discussed in this paper. An improved version of a high capacity data hiding scheme, called bit-plane complexity segmentation (BPCS) steganography, is explained, and its effectiveness in hiding medical records in color cervical images is demonstrated.