33 IEEE Communications Magazine • April 2018 0163-6804/18/$25.00 © 2018 IEEE
ABSTRACT
With the invention of new communication
technologies, new features and facilities are
provided in a smart healthcare framework. The
features and facilities aim to provide a seamless,
easy-to-use, accurate, and real-time healthcare
service to clients. As health is a sensitive issue,
it should be taken care of with utmost security
and caution. This article proposes a new medical
image forgery detection system for the healthcare
framework to verify that images related to health-
care are not changed or altered. The system works
on a noise map of an image, applies a multi-res-
olution regression filter on the noise map, and
feeds the output to support-vector-machine-based
and extreme-learning-based classifers. The noise
map is created in an edge computing resource,
while the fltering and classifcation are done in a
core cloud computing resource. In this way, the
system works seamlessly and in real time. The
bandwidth requirement of the proposed system is
also reasonable.
INTRODUCTION
Next-generation network technologies such as
ffth generation (5G), edge computing, and cloud
computing have revolutionized many sectors
including the healthcare sector. Recently, the
healthcare sector has seen drastic improvement
in terms of facilities [1]. Many new features have
been added to improve people’s satisfaction. Peo-
ple can now consult with doctors without visiting
them, check diabetes, heartbeat, voice abnor-
mality, and emotion using various sensors. While
the healthcare sector is booming, several aspects
need attention to make the healthcare facility
more secure and private. For example, if medical
data are leaked or altered, the concerned patient
may face social embarrassment or let down,
while other people may gain an illegal advantage.
Therefore, there should be a system in a smart
healthcare framework that can check whether the
medical data are changed during transmission by
hackers or intruders [2].
There are two types of methods to check
whether the data are changed or not: intrusive
and non-intrusive. In the intrusive method, some
information is added to the data in such a way
that it does not hamper the message in the data.
The information is called a watermark. Later, if
any question arises, the watermark is extract-
ed from the data and matched with the orig-
inal watermark. If they do not match, the data
are considered to be forged or changed. In the
non-intrusive method, no watermark is added to
the data. Some algorithms are used to find any
distortion or change in the data by analyzing any
abnormal patterns. The intrusive method some-
times is not feasible, because some data may not
have watermarks intentionally or unintentional-
ly. As the non-intrusive method does not require
any watermark, any data can be verified against
change or fraud.
There are many non-intrusive techniques pro-
posed in the literature. In this article, we focus
on non-intrusive techniques to detect image forg-
ery. A good review on this topic can be found in
[3]. Image forgery can be done in many ways,
involving one or more images. The most common
image forgeries are copy-move forgery and splic-
ing. In copy-move image forgery, one or some
parts are copied and pasted into other parts in the
same image. This type of forgery is mainly done to
conceal some information in the image. In splic-
ing, some parts of an image or more images are
copied and pasted into another image. This type
of forgery is done mostly to defame a person.
In the healthcare domain, image forgery can
be serious. If a mammogram is hacked, and the
intruder uses the copy-move forgery to enlarge
the area of cancer, the diagnosis will be wrong,
and the patient will be in life-threatening trouble.
If there is an image forgery detection system in a
healthcare framework, it can detect the forgery
before starting the diagnostic process. In the case
of a forgery, the system can ask for another sam-
ple from the patient. The intrusive method (e.g.,
embedding a watermark in the medical image) of
forgery detection is not suitable in a cloud-based
smart healthcare framework mainly because of
two reasons:
• Embedding a watermark needs extra infor-
mation for transmission, which may require
extra bandwidth and cause a delay in the
transmission.
• Embedding a watermark may decrease the
visual quality of the image, which in turn
afects the diagnostic process.
There are some existing medical image forgery
detection systems in the literature, although the
number is small. Ulutas et al. proposed a forgery
detection method using a rotation invariant local
binary pattern (LBPROT) and a scale invariant
Ahmed Ghoneim, Ghulam Muhammad, Syed Umar Amin, and Brij Gupta
ADVANCES IN NEXT GENERATION NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES FOR SMART HEALTHCARE
The authors propose a
new medical image forg-
ery detection system for
the healthcare framework
to verify that images
related to healthcare are
not changed or altered.
The system works on a
noise map of an image,
applies a multi-resolution
regression filter on the
noise map, and feeds the
output to support-vec-
tor-machine-based and
extreme-learning-based
classifiers.
Ahmed Ghoneim(corresponding author) is with King Saud University and Menoufia University; Ghulam Muhammad and Syed Umar Amin are with
King Saud University;Brij Gupta is with National Institute of Technology.
Digital Object Identifier:
10.1109/MCOM.2018.1700817
Medical Image Forgery Detection for
Smart Healthcare