Data hiding scheme for medical images using lossless code for mobile HIMS

Information Technology advances have bought forth new challenges in healthcare information management, due to the vast amount of medical data that needs to efficiently stored, retrieved and distributed, and the increased security threats that explicitly have to be addressed. In particular, embedding patient information into a medical image through data hiding could improve the level of security and confidentiality that is essential for diffusion of medical information system. Such security provides integrity of medical images and corresponding documentations, along with protection of confidential information. The scheme imperceptibly embeds in medical images patient's personal information like name and unique identification number. Our objective was to have a simple model which uses minimal resources and hence a strong candidate for use in mobile healthcare applications where the resources of memory, computation and connectivity are extremely limited. To meet these requirements, this paper presents a powerful yet simple lossless scheme for the medical image processing. The method is distortion-tolerant in application. The original image can be recovered with almost no distortion. The scheme has been implemented for images of various sizes and a comparative study is presented.