Steganography Applications - Encoding Medical Records Within Medical Images

Steganography is the art of hiding messages in files of various formats. The goal of this effort is to hide a message containing medical data in a medical image so that the inclusion of the data is undetectable in the resultant image. In addition, the concealing/hiding process must be robust and not easily reversed by unauthorized users who want access to the hidden data. A program implementing the least significant bit (LSB) steganography technique for grayscale and colored images was developed. The program was tested on publicly available medical image datasets and publicly available medical test results. A metric for measuring the difference between the source / original image and the image containing encoded messages was analyzed. The results from the exercise show that there are positive correlations between the size of the input message and the MSE and PSNR. It also shows that as more images are made, the time per image to encode the messages is effectively constant. The program is proven to be an effective method at hiding medical data inside medical images. Future efforts will continue towards creating a steganography and encryption application for protecting and packaging medical data and images that can be used by medical professionals, confidently and commonly.