The advent of the fourth industrial revolution along with developments in other emerging technologies, such as Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence as well as cloud and quantum computing, smart healthcare systems (SHS) are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives. Meanwhile, patients, doctors, and other medical personnel rely on the safe and efficient storage, transmission, and analysis of medical images and electronic health records for successful diagnosis, treatment, and management of different ailments. Moreover since, for various reasons, medical images are always the target of different illicit criminal activities, studies to utilise advanced information technologies to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of such data have become a major priority in all SHS platforms. Our study evaluates recent efforts to deploy emerging technologies to design, secure, and enhance the efficiency of SHS that are based on medical images. It is hoped that this work will stimulate further interest aimed at the pursuit of more advanced algorithms and frameworks covering all aspects of security and privacy in emerging and future smart healthcare applications.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a new computing paradigm with great potential to alleviate resource limitations attributed to mobile device users (MDUs) by offloading intensive computations to ubiquitous MEC server. However, most of the current offloading policies allow MDUs to transmit their tasks to the same connected small base stations (sBSs), which invariably increases latency and limits performance gain due to overload. Moreover, the security issue mitigating sensitive communication of information is not adequately addressed. Therefore, in this study, in addition to proposing a joint load balancing and computation offloading (CO) technique for MEC systems, we introduce a new security layer to circumvent potential security issues. First, a load balancing algorithm for efficient redistribution of MDUs among sBSs is proposed. In addition, a new advanced encryption standard (AES) cryptographic technique suffused with electrocardiogram (ECG) signal-based encryption and decryption key is presented as a security layer to safeguard the vulnerability of data during the transmission. Furthermore, an integrated model of load balancing, CO and security is formulated as a problem whose goal is to decrease the time and energy demands of the system. Detailed experimental results prove that our model with and without the additional security layers can save about 68.2% and 72.4% of system consumption compared to the local execution.

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) enable various oceanic applications which require effective packet transmission. In this case, sparse node distribution, imbalance in terms of overall energy consumption between the different sensor nodes, dynamic network topology, and inappropriate selection of relay nodes cause void holes. Addressing this problem, we present a relay-based void hole prevention and repair (ReVOHPR) protocol by multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for UWSN. ReVOHPR is a global solution that implements different phases of operations that act mutually in order to efficiently reduce and identify void holes and trap relay nodes to avoid it. ReVOHPR adopts the following operations as ocean depth (levels)-based equal cluster formation, dynamic sleep scheduling, virtual graph-based routing, and relay-assisted void hole repair. For energy-efficient cluster forming, entropy-based eligibility ranking (E2R) is presented, which elects stable cluster heads (CHs). Then, dynamic sleep scheduling is implemented by the dynamic kernel Kalman filter (DK2F) algorithm in which sleep and active modes are based on the node’s current status. Intercluster routing is performed by maximum matching nodes that are selected by dual criteria, and also the data are transmitted to AUV. Finally, void holes are detected and repaired by the bicriteria mayfly optimization (BiCMO) algorithm. The BiCMO focuses on reducing the number of holes and data packet loss and maximizes the quality of service (QoS) and energy efficiency of the network. This protocol is timely dealing with node failures in packet transmission via multihop routing. Simulation is implemented by the NS3 (AquaSim module) simulator that evaluates the performance in the network according to the following metrics: average energy consumption, delay, packet delivery rate, and throughput. The simulation results of the proposed REVOHPR protocol comparing to the previous protocols allowed to conclude that the REVOHPR has considerable advantages. Due to the development of a new protocol with a set of phases for data transmission, energy consumption minimization, and void hole avoidance and mitigation in UWSN, the number of active nodes rate increases with the improvement in overall QoS.

A method to analyze the similarity between two quantum images of the same size is proposed based on a representation for the quantum images. The similarity value is estimated according to the probability distribution of the results from quantum measurements. The proposed method is fast because a single operation can transform the entire information encoded in two images simultaneously. Two simulation-based experiments, which provide a reasonable estimation to the quantum images' similarity, are implemented using Matlab on a classical computer by means of linear algebra with complex vectors as quantum states and unitary matrices as unitary transformations. It also opens the door towards image searching from a database on quantum computers.