PPM-SEM: A privacy-preserving mechanism for sharing electronic patient records and medical images in telemedicine

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.