PPM-SEM: A Privacy-Preserving Mechanism for Sharing Electronic Patient Records and Medical Images in Telemedicine
Wenying Wen, Ziye Yuan, Shuren Qi, Yushu Zhang, Yuming Fang · IEEE Transactions on Multimedia · 2023
Despite the various privacy protection methods that are available through medical services platforms, it is still challenging for patients to achieve a desirable level of privacy protection during image sharing. Therefore, this paper proposes a privacy protection mechanism, called PPM-SEM, for the secure sharing of electronic patient records (EPRs) and medical images in telemedicine; it includes two stages: privacy preparation and privacy protection and reconstruction. In the first stage, a dual watermark (i.e., an image watermark) is generated by combining the patient's EPRs with an image, which can be utilized to ensure the security of patient identity data (i.e., a text watermark).Inthe second stage, a modal transformation network is constructed by training the dual watermark together as an additional channel. This network is called watermark-CycleGAN (W-CycleGAN), which can address the privacy and security issues concerning medical images and provide a double protection mechanism for EPRs. Experimental results demonstrate that only the recovery network with the correct key can restore high-quality medical images. In addition, the patient's EPRs can be fully extracted; i.e., 100% accuracy can be maintained. It is noted that the nonpaired recovery network can also recover visually meaningful medical images, thereby realizing privacy protection for patients in telemedicine scenarios.