Robust Medical Image Encryption and Compression Using a DNA‐Chaos Cryptosystem for Enhancing Telemedicine Applications

ABSTRACT Recent advancements in online communication have made it possible to securely transmit sensitive data, such as medical images containing confidential patient information. As the medical industry embraces telemedicine applications, the need for solutions to protect such essential data grows. Within the scope of this paper, a novel image‐to‐image encryption‐decryption‐compression (ITIEDC) technique and a lossless compression technique are suggested for utilisation in a cryptosystem that employs chaos maps, piecewise linear chaotic maps (PWLCMs), DNA encoding technology, one‐time pad (OTP), and MD5. Arithmetic coding is utilised as a compression approach in the proposed methodology. The suggested DNA‐based chaos encryption method increases the image's entropy, according to experimental findings. For both encryption and encryption‐compression techniques, the average time to encrypt a 512 × 512 pixel image is 3 s or less. There is a remarkable closeness between the correlation coefficient and zero. The NPCR for medical images is likewise quite close to 99.60, demonstrating the system's resistance to discriminatory attacks. The X‐ray and MRI images are provided from actual patients at Al‐Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, while the rest are from an online data set. Notably, the proposed method achieves the process of encrypting and decrypting varying‐sized medical images with a single computation. The simulation results validate the appropriateness of this approach for safeguarding sensitive medical images.