Encrypted Medical Image Storage in DNA Domain

Medical images have become an integral part of healthcare systems to provide quick and accurate treatment of diseases. The challenge, however, is to store these data, as they are huge in volume. DNA provides an efficient medium for the storage of bulk data. This data can be secured against malicious use using DNA based encryption algorithms. This paper presents a novel DNA based compression-encryption algorithm, specially designed for medical images. A significant part of medical images contains homogeneous pixels, which are even more prominent when decomposed into their bit-planes. This redundancy can be removed while compression, based on which the proposed DNA-based QuadTree Decomposition algorithm has been designed. A sequence of four DNA nucleotides represents the entire image, and these can be used to recover back the original image using the decoding algorithm. To secure the obtained sequences, DNA-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm is applied in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode which encrypts the sequences using the symmetric key and initial vector parameters. The image cannot be recovered from these encrypted sequences unless decrypted using the correct key, and the algorithm for AES is secured against cryptographic attacks.