A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Watermark Based Medical Image Sharing Method

The patients' medical image data are one of the most important data in e-health. Medical image data usually play a crucial role in disease diagnosis and implicate unpredictable potential values for improving diagnostic methods and adjusting diagnostic results. To exploit their incredible potential values, medical images need to be shared among different hospitals, medical institutions and insurance companies and others. But how to securely and effectively share these medical image data becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we proposed to combine encryption and digital watermark technology to achieve a secure and privacy-preserving medical image sharing method. The QR code image of the concatenation of authoritative diagnosis results and the hash of the original medical image is generated as the watermark image. The Discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Inverse DCT (IDCT) algorithms are utilized to embed the watermark image. As the watermarked medical images are desensitized, they are stored to a smart contract based blockchain, such as Ethereum, to achieve secure and fair sharing between data owners and users. The experimental results show that the proposed method can resist several attacks meanwhile it is efficient in medical image sharing.