Blockchain-based Secure Storage System for Medical Image Data

Abstract

A large number of patient images are generated every day in medical applications such as ultrasound, Computer Tomography scans, X-Ray, and so on. Medical data is related to patient privacy and personal rights. Thus, the security and privacy of medical images become an important issue. In order to comply with the regulations of the Personal Data Protection Act, medical images need to be protected under a secure method. Therefore, we proposed a secure storage method for chest X-Ray images from Kaggle based on blockchain technology. We developed a smart contract to control role-based access permissions and authenticate medical images. We performed a cryptographic operation on the X-Ray image after each medical examination and stored the image fingerprint in the blockchain. Artificial intelligence was used to identify pneumonia-related diseases. We compared the required X-Ray retrieval time with the conventional PACS systems. The experimental results showed that the overhead of the proposed scheme using blockchain was only about 5 %.