Steganography Techniques in Medical Images, a Systematic Review

In radiodiagnosis and imaging, vast amounts of medical image data, including image and non-image information, are generated every second from different radiology centers. The safe transmission of these images over an insecure network is a challenge, as the data are susceptible to attacks over an insecure network. Several cryptography schemes have been in place for many years, but they are time-consuming tasks for coding and decoding images. Therefore, improved solutions are required to ensure the integrity of the data. Steganography is one such method that is a science and art of hiding data or confidential information in any cover medium so that the data can be secured. For example, a known video, audio, or image can be used as a cover medium for secure communications. Various techniques are used to hide the secret data in an image, and the purpose of this review is to provide insight into the state-of-the-art techniques in image steganography in the radiology domain. This paper provides a brief overview and review of steganography techniques and their applications in the medical domain, a comparison with state-of-the-art technology, and the scope of future work. We considered indexed journal papers from the last ten years of the systematic review. There is scope for the improvement of this technique on the set of images at the dataset level instead of individual images which would provide more security to images.