With the popularity of cloud storage services and telemedicine platforms， more and more medical images are uploaded to the cloud. After being uploaded， the uploaded medical images may be leaked to unauthorized third parties， resulting in the disclosure of users’ personal privacy. Besides， if medical images are only uploaded to a single server for storage， they are vulnerable to attacks resulting in the loss of all data. To solve these problems， a medical image privacy protection algorithm based on thumbnail encryption and distributed storage was proposed. Firstly， by encrypting the thumbnail of the original medical image， the relevance of the medical images was preserved properly while achieving the encryption effect. Secondly， the double embedding method was adopted when hiding secret information， and data extraction and image recovery were performed separately to achieve Reversible Data Hiding （RDH） of the encrypted image. Finally， the distributed storage method based on polynomial shared matrix was used to generate n shares of the image and distribute them to n servers. Experimental results show that by using the encrypted thumbnail as carrier， the proposed algorithm exceeds the traditional security encryption methods on embedding rate. Even if the server is attacked， the receiver can recover the original image and private information as long as it receives no less than k shares. In the privacy protection of medical images， experiments were carried out from the aspects of anti-attack and image recovery， and the analysis results show that the proposed encryption algorithm has good performance and high security.
