Steganography for medical record image

Chunjun Hua; Yue Wu; Yiqiao Shi; Menghan Hu; Rong Xie; Guangtao Zhai; Xiao-Ping Zhang

doi:10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107344

Steganography for medical record image

Comput Biol Med. 2023 Oct:165:107344. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107344. Epub 2023 Aug 19.

Authors

Chunjun Hua¹, Yue Wu², Yiqiao Shi³, Menghan Hu⁴, Rong Xie⁵, Guangtao Zhai⁶, Xiao-Ping Zhang⁷

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing, East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China.
² Ophthalmology Department, Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, 639 Zhizaoju Road, Shanghai 200011, China.
³ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing, East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China. Electronic address: 71215904075@stu.ecnu.edu.cn.
⁴ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing, East China Normal University, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China. Electronic address: mhhu@ce.ecnu.edu.cn.
⁵ Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China. Electronic address: xierong@sjtu.edu.cn.
⁶ Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China. Electronic address: zhaiguangtao@sjtu.edu.cn.
⁷ Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto M5B 2K3, Canada. Electronic address: xzhang@ee.ryerson.ca.

PMID: 37603961
DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107344

Abstract

Medical record images in EHR system are users' privacy and an asset, and there is an urgent need to protect this data. Image steganography can offer a potential solution. A steganographic model for medical record images is therefore developed based on StegaStamp. In contrast to natural images, medical record images are document images, which can be very vulnerable to image cropping attacks. Therefore, we use text region segmentation and watermark region localization to combat the image cropping attack. The distortion network has been designed to take into account the distortion that can occur during the transmission of medical record images, making the model robust against communication induced distortions. In addition, based on StegaStamp, we innovatively introduced FISM as part of the loss function to reduce the ripple texture in the steganographic image. The experimental results show that the designed distortion network and the FISM loss function term can be well suited for the steganographic task of medical record images from the perspective of decoding accuracy and image quality.

Keywords: Digital image watermarking; Electronic health records system; Image steganography; Medical record image.

MeSH terms

Confidentiality*
Medical Informatics
Medical Records*