Secure authentication and traceability of medical audio data remain critical challenges in modern telemedicine systems and digital health record management.. This paper proposes a novel blind and robust audio watermarking scheme for medical applications. The method combines the Fractional Charlier Transform (FrCT) for optimized time–frequency decomposition, local entropy analysis with critical-band masking for intelligent coefficient selection, and adaptive dithered quantization index modulation (ADQIM) for imperceptible watermark embedding. The proposed scheme provides comprehensive encryption of metadata including patient information and acquisition context through AES-based cryptographic mechanisms, while maintaining imperceptibility and embedding robustness. Comprehensive experimental validation on a diverse medical audio corpus demonstrates that the method achieves a practical payload capacity of 71.8 bits per second, high audio transparency with an SNR of 38.2 dB and a PESQ score of 4.15, and strong resilience against various signal processing attacks with an average BER of 3.2%. The approach provides a computationally efficient solution suitable for integration into operational telemedicine platforms and large-scale medical archiving systems, offering reliable authentication and integrity verification of medical audio records.

In recent years, metaheuristic algorithms have gained prominence as powerful computational techniques for solving complex optimization problems across various domains, including healthcare. Their ability to effectively explore vast solution spaces enables them to identify optimal or near-optimal solutions to challenging problems. Despite their growing importance, metaheuristic algorithms, inspired by natural and human problem-solving strategies, are increasingly applied in healthcare to address complex optimization challenges such as diagnosis, treatment planning, and resource allocation. But traditional ML models often face problems like getting stuck in training, taking too much time to compute, and not balancing exploration and exploitation properly. These issues make them less effective for solving complex medical classification problems. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces new hybrid metaheuristic models such as Ropalidia Marginata (RM) hybrid with various metaheuristic algorithms such as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), Firefly, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), Differential Evolution (DE), and Bat Algorithm. Further all these hybrid metaheuristic algorithms are combined with a Feedforward Neural Network (FFNN) to train the network more efficiently. The proposed method uses the dominance-based behavior of RM wasp to improve the global search ability, is stable during learning, and improves classification accuracy. The performance of proposed frameworks is to check against several start of the art models on three critical medical datasets such as breast cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. The results showed that proposed models gave better results than the traditional algorithms in terms of accuracy, mean squared error (MSE), standard deviation (SD), and AUC-ROC.