Abstract
The world is witnessing a transition from a traditional way of living to a smart culture supported by technologies and architecture such as, Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology. Smart healthcare solutions are an inevitable part of this smart world. Medical images are widely communicated through the internet for better diagnosis and quick suggestions from experts. A major concern while data is being transmitted through an unsecured network is its security. Encrypting the medical image is one way to secure the image. Reversible data hiding (RDH) is a research area, actively involved in the field of information security due to its applications in medical image communication. One of the RDH schemes called reversible watermarking is widely used for medical image authentication. In this process, we hide a watermark over the medical image such that, at some point in time, the receiver can recover the image while extracting the watermark. The receiver extracts the watermark and compares it with the original watermark to ensure that the medical image is not subjected to any forgery. The reversible data hiding schemes can also be used for transmitting Electronic Patient Records (EPR) data by hiding it in the medical image as an alternative to sending those as separate files. For example, RDH in encrypted images (RDHEI) hides the patient’s private information in an encrypted medical image for transmission. This chapter discusses the basics of RDH schemes, a few methods, and their applications in healthcare along with the challenges while designing and implementing RDH schemes so that the researchers can focus their work on the specified domain.
