Introducing a new algorithm for medical image encryption based on chaotic feature of cellular automata

Nowadays, with the expansion of telemedicine networks, providing security of medical documents plays an important role in medical society especially in protection of patient privacy. For this reason, medical centers spend a lot of money to improve their information security. One of the methods of improving medical information security is encryption of medical information that can be implemented with various algorithms. Due to the special characteristics of visual data and other information, methods used in image cryptography are limited and in some cases, they suffer from some security flaws and limitations in application. In this paper, according to the chaotic characteristics of cellular automata, new algorithm has been proposed for encryption medical image. The results indicated that the proposed algorithm provided more security as well as higher speed. Moreover, this method hasn´t any errors in decryption stage. These features are rarely seen simultaneously in one encryption algorithm.