An Integrated Algorithm Supporting Confidentiality and Integrity for Secured Access and Storage of DICOM Images

In healthcare industry, the patient's medical data plays a vital role because diagnosis of anyailments is done by using those data. The high volume of medical data leads to scalability andmaintenance issues when using health-care provider's on-site picture archiving andcommunication system (PACS) and network oriented storage system. Therefore a standard isneeded for maintaining the medical data and for better diagnosis. Since the medical data reflectsin a similar way to individuals’ personal information, secrecy should be maintained. Maintainingsecrecy can be done by encrypting the data, but as medical data involves images and videos,traditional text based encryption/decryption schemes are not adequate for providingconfidentiality. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for securing the DICOM format medicalarchives by providing better confidentiality and maintaining their integrity. Our contribution in thisalgorithm is of twofold: (1) Development of Improved Chaotic based Arnold Cat Map forencryption/decryption of DICOM files and (2) Applying a new hash algorithm based on chaotictheory for those encrypted files for maintaining integrity. By applying this algorithm, the secrecy ofmedical data is maintained. The proposed algorithm is tested with various DICOM format imagearchives by studying the following parameters i) PSNR - for quality of images and ii) Key - forsecurity.