RAD-IoMT: Robust adversarial defence mechanisms for IoMT medical image analysis

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) represents a significant technological advancement with exceptional capabilities across various domains, particularly in healthcare. IoMT integrates medical devices, software applications, and healthcare systems, enabling seamless communication and data exchange over the Internet. As deep learning (DL) continues to evolve, applications within IoMT are increasingly dominant. However, these DL applications face new reliability challenges, particularly due to the security threat posed by adversarial attacks. These attacks introduce subtle and often imperceptible perturbations that can lead to significantly erroneous predictions by classifiers. To address these reliability concerns, we propose a novel security mechanism using an attack detector specifically designed to counter adversarial attacks within IoMT environments. This approach leverages a transformer model to enhance resistance against such attacks. We validate our method through experiments using datasets for skin cancer, retina damage, and chest X-rays, testing against both white-box attacks (e.g., Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD)) and black-box attacks (e.g., Additive Gaussian Noise (AGN) and Additive Uniform Noise (AUN)). Our proposed attack detector exhibited F1 and accuracy 0.91 and 0.94. Following the successful application of our attack detector, the disease classification model achieved an average F1 and accuracy of 0.97 and 0.98 compared to the attack model performance (F1 and accuracy of 0.64 and 0.60, respectively) across the three datasets.