Applications of data hiding techniques in medical and healthcare systems: a survey

Nowadays, scientists make effort to provide security for the communication channels. Several security and privacy threats are introduced via the Internet as the major communication channel. Therefore, information exchanging through the Internet should be protected and secured. Now healthcare systems are getting very common in the world. A health care system should preserve privacy while sending patients’ information, prevent the patients’ information from tampering, and prevent any sabotage in the healthcare systems. Therefore, it is crucial to provide security in such systems to attract the confidence of people for using the Internet (network)-based health care systems. In this respect, the goal of this paper is to review the accessories to provide security in healthcare systems. Our objective is to state the achievements of a literature review regarding the security of health care systems provided by information hiding methods including cryptography, steganography and watermarking methods. Furthermore, discussion about these methods, the media employed in these methods such as medical images and biomedical signals, their pros and cons and the applications in healthcare systems are provided. Correspondingly, we share the visions into the open research problems and highlight future directions in this extent. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature.