LAUSR

Fusing the single modality medical images to obtain a distinct multimodality image is needed to ensure a better clinical experience. However, the distribution of these fused images brings the issues of ownership and authentication and has attracted many researchers. Presently, large volumes of medical data are stored on cloud platforms. However, outsourcing medical data to this popular platform may introduce security issues. Following this, we introduce a secure data hiding in fused medical image for smart healthcare, since it is also suitable for applications in the cloud. To achieve this, we first create a fused medical image as a cover by nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). The method, which is based on NSCT, QR, and Schur decomposition, allows concealing the image and electronic patient records (EPR) mark into the fused image. Importantly, EPR watermark includes a hash value of cover is created first and then embedded into the cover via magic cube-based procedure. Finally, the marked image is encrypted using deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), chaotic maps, and a hash function-based encryption scheme. The introduced watermarking scheme has been evaluated using 25 pairs of medical images and several embedding/extracting parameters. Apart from being satisfactorily imperceptible, the proposed work is also robust and secure against well-known signal processing attacks and promising results are obtained when compared with similar techniques. It indicates a considerable improvement in robustness of 66.7% and 99.7% over existing discrete wavelet transform (DWT)–singular value decomposition (SVD)-based watermarking schemes.