A multilevel secure information communication model for healthcare systems

The emerging demand for sharing medical digital images amid specialists and hospitals for enhanced and precise analysis necessitates protecting patients' privacy. The communication of such information over available channels is very much susceptible to numerous security threats. The contemporary defence level is not strong enough for maintaining the protection and integrity of information in a required field like the human healthcare sector. There is a stern need for a robust safety mechanism. In this paper, a model is created by harmonizing various cryptography and steganography techniques to secure secret diagnostic information. This proposal provides multi-level security by utilizing a blend of Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA) and Quantum Chaos (QC) for Encryption mechanism as the first level and the Improved BPCS (IBPCS) steganography as the next step to conceal the resultant cipher in a cover image. Both image formats, Grayscale, and colored are employed as the cover images to hide various volumes of the confidential data. The proposed framework is implemented in MATLAB and assessed using different performance metrics like mean square error (MSE), Peak Signal to noise ratio (PSNR), bit error rate (BER), structural component (SC), structural similarity (SSIM), and so forth that are referenced in writing. Appraisal and comparison with state-of-art methods are also made after applying the different attacks (geometric, Gaussian, salt and pepper, flipping, etc.) on the stego image. Result analysis illustrates that the proposed model reveals its capacity to conceal the confidential patient's information into a transmitted cover image with high imperceptibility and robustness in the presence and absence of attacks.