V Akshita., Dhanush J. S, Dikshitha Varman. A, V. Krishna Kumar
Immunization is all about using Block chain for managing and tracing the vaccine stocks, logistics and transparent distribution. Immunization gives you continuous visibility and enables actionable insights to track vaccine distribution and ensure a fair and equitable distribution. Immunization allows you to book your vaccination appointments and will also allow you to keep track of the vaccine being distributed. Block chain helps in maintaining the integrity and transparency of the whole process right from inception of the vaccine.
Andy S. K. Cheng, Qiongyao Guan, Yan Su, Ping Zhou · 5 authors
This brief report aimed to describe a narrative review about the application of machine learning (ML) methods and Blockchain technology (BCT) in the healthcare field, and to illustrate the integration of these two technologies in cancer survivorship care. A total of six eligible papers were included in the narrative review. ML and BCT are two data-driven technologies, and there is rapidly growing interest in integrating them for clinical data management and analysis in healthcare. The findings of this report indicate that both technologies can integrate feasibly and effectively. In conclusion, this brief report provided the state-of-art evidence about the integration of the most promising technologies of ML and BCT in health field, and gave an example of how to apply these two most disruptive technologies in cancer survivorship care.
Open access
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Yazeed Alabdulkarim, Abdulmajeed Alameer, Mohammed Almukaynizi, Abdulaziz Almaslukh
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries around the globe to put strict policies and measures in place in an attempt to control the rapid spread of the virus. These measures have affected economic activities and have impacted a broad range of businesses, such as international traveling, restaurants, and shopping malls. As COVID-19 vaccination efforts progress, countries are starting to relax international travel constraints and permit passengers from certain destinations to cross the border. Moreover, travelers from those destinations are likely required to provide certificates of vaccination results or negative COVID-19 tests before crossing the borders. Implementing these travel guidelines requires sharing information between countries, such as the number of COVID-19 cases and vaccination certificates for travelers. In this paper, we introduce SPIN, a framework leveraging a permissioned blockchain for sharing COVID-19 information between countries. This includes public data, such as the number of vaccinated people, and private data, such as vaccination certificates for individuals. Additionally, we employ cancelable fingerprint templates to authenticate private information about travelers. We analyze the framework from scalability, efficiency, security, and privacy perspectives. To validate our framework, we provide a prototype implementation using the Hyperledger Fabric platform.
Shirajus Salekin Nabil, Md. Sabbir Alam Pran, Ali Haque, Narayan Ranjan Chakraborty · 6 authors
COVID-19 has changed almost all aspects of our lives. Governments around the world have imposed lockdowns to slow down the transmissions. Fortunately, we have found the vaccine, in fact, a good number of them. However, managing the testing and vaccination process of the total population is a mammoth job. However, there are always delays or data silo problems in multi-organizational work. Therefore, streamlining this process is vital to improve efficiency and save more lives. Because of its effective data sharing mechanism among different entities with a number of security features, blockchain can be an effective tool for different applications in the health sector. Furthermore, blockchain provides a distributed system along with greater privacy, transparency, and authenticity. In this article, we have presented a blockchain-based system that seamlessly integrates testing and vaccination systems, allowing the system to be transparent. The instant verification of any tamper-proof COVID-19 test result has been developed, which will serve as “Test Certificates”. A transparent and efficient vaccination system has also been exhibited and implemented as the “Digital Vaccine Passport” (DVP) system. The infection rate-based prioritization will ensure a transparent and fair vaccination process as well as tackle the distribution issue of the limited amount of vaccine. The comparative review with other existing works is also discussed, highlighting a clear difference from the existing works. Our proposed system is distinctive on the basis of prioritization of vaccines and seamless integration of test certificates and vaccine passports, which will aid in controlling the pandemic situation. This system will also be handy in the case of tackling any future pandemics initially.
Mohammed Baz, Sabita Khatri, Abdullah Baz, Hosam Alhakami · 6 authors
The rapid emergence of novel virus named SARS-CoV2 and unchecked dissemination of this virus around the world ever since its outbreak in 2020, provide critical research criteria to assess the vulnerabilities of our current he... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Tech Science Press
Artificial intelligence (AI) programs are applied to methods such as diagnostic procedures, treatment protocol development, patient monitoring, drug development, personalized medicine in healthcare, and outbreak predictions in global health, as in the case of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Machine learning (ML) is a field of AI that allows computers to learn and improve without being explicitly programmed. ML algorithms can also analyze large amounts of data called Big data through electronic health records for disease prevention and diagnosis. Wearable medical devices are used to continuously monitor an individual’s health status and store it in cloud computing. In the context of a newly published study, the potential benefits of sophisticated data analytics and machine learning are discussed in this review. We have conducted a literature search in all the popular databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE/PubMed and Google Scholar search engines. This paper describes the utilization of concepts underlying ML, big data, blockchain technology and their importance in medicine, healthcare, public health surveillance, case estimations in COVID-19 pandemic and other epidemics. The review also goes through the possible consequences and difficulties for medical practitioners and health technologists in designing futuristic models to improve the quality and well-being of human lives.
Sukhpal Singh Gill, Ricardo Vinuesa, Venki Balasubramanian, Soumya K. Ghosh
We are pleased to present a special issue that focuses on the software systems for managing the impact of the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected around 192 million people worldwide and has led to ˜4.13 million deaths as of July 22, 2021. Globally, most of the countries have implemented lockdowns to protect their citizens. However, lockdown over an extended period is unsustainable. Hence, it is widely believed that virus testing and tracking is the best approach to ease lockdown measures. There is a need for innovative software systems to manage the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic effectively in many areas such as healthcare system, transport systems, supply-chain system, educational system, government-service delivery, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing, software industries, and multinational companies. For example, in healthcare, smart-software systems would be able to remotely measure a person's body temperature, heart and respiratory rates, identifying their movements (including sneezing, coughing, shivering, etc.) to identify whether a person is displaying symptoms of COVID-19 or not. An essential aspect associated with these technologies is data privacy, scalability, and quality of service (QoS) in terms of reliability, availability, security, latency, and energy which need to be considered throughout the development of the software systems. In countries like India, UK, Russia, Brazil, and USA, the system would also help to ensure that isolated communities have access to testing, delivered in a fast, accurate, and efficient manner. These software systems would help and support the assessment of public-health strategies and policies such as social distancing and assess further interventions to control the spread of the virus. Innovative software systems can increase stakeholder participation, as cost-effective assistance in the COVID-19 pandemic monitoring is of great interest to many countries. To manage the impact of this pandemic, there is a need to design and develop scalable, reliable, and energy-efficient sustainable software solutions for different COVID-19 scenarios. In consideration of the existing systems and their features, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based system suitable for COVID-19 or pandemic situations associated with other influenza viruses can be developed. Furthermore, these systems can be integrated with artificial-intelligence (AI) processes for effective data-collection, analysis, statistical visualization, sharing, and decision making. Moreover, these systems can be implemented using both simulations and real-time testbeds for COVID-19 operations (sanitization, medication, monitoring, thermal imaging, etc.) to test their performance in terms of scalability, reliability, availability, and energy efficiency. There is a need to use AI methods, such as reinforcement learning, deep learning, and genetic algorithms while developing IoT-based software systems to achieve self-learning, self-adaptation, and autonomous decision-making capabilities in order to improve efficiency of the systems. Meanwhile, a huge voluminous amount of complex data is generated from various sources including World Health Organization (WHO), social networking, edge devices, private and public hospitals, patients and academic institutes, which needs an effective big data analytics mechanism to manage this data proficiently. Furthermore, there is a need to study the impact of system configuration on workload processing at different cloud nodes while maintaining the QoS dynamically. The data are collected in databases, it is subsequently examined and monitored, and it is important to manage data consistency and integrity. In this context, we argue that it is essential to employ decentralized data-gathering approaches, maintaining the privacy of the population as a high priority. This special issue has received articles by researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to develop innovative software systems for managing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This special issue, therefore, aims to focus the attention of its readers to four research articles carefully selected after multiple rounds of peer-review. The brief contributions of these papers are discussed in the following section: The first paper entitled “An approach to forecast impact of COVID-19 using supervised machine learning model” by Mohan et al.1 proposes a hybrid model to predict the effect of COVID-19 using moving regressive, autoregressive, and ensemble learning model. This work uses two datasets from Worldometer and Ministry of Health & Family Welfare of India to conduct the countrywise predictions across the world and statewise predictions of India, respectively. The second paper entitled “NovidChain: Blockchain-based privacy-preserving platform for COVID-19 test/vaccine certificates” by Abid et al.2 includes various promising ideas such as maintains the immutability and data integrity using Blockchain technology, enhances the privacy by incorporating encryption for personal information and verifies the COVID-19 proof using W3C verifiable credentials standard immediately. The third paper entitled “Software System to Predict the Infection in COVID-19 Patients using Deep Learning and Web of Things” by Singh et al.3 generates synthetic data using various data augmentation techniques. Proposed system uses U-Net and WoT to segment the COVID Medseg and Radiopedia datasets in an autonomic manner. Experimental results show that the system gives better performance in terms of network latency, response time, and server latency. The fourth paper entitled “Advanced Data Integration in Banking, Financial, and Insurance Software in the Age of COVID-19” by Maiti et al.4 contributes to recognize the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global Banking Financial Services and Insurance landscape. Further, a hype cycle has been developed to find out the important software technologies to handle real-world challenges related to corporate. We believe the work that has been approved in this special issue will assist readers of the journal and a broader research community to learn about the topics of software systems and impacts of COVID-19 pandemic, and inspire them to study more in this area. We would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief (Prof. Rajkumar Buyya) and editorial board members for allowing us to bring out this special issue and guiding us throughout the process. We also want to express our gratitude to and further acknowledge the administrative staff, reviewers, and especially the authors for their contributions to the success of this issue.
The world is facing multiple healthcare challenges because of the emergence of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. The pandemic has exposed the limitations of handling public healthcare emergencies using existing digital healthcare technologies. Thus, the COVID-19 situation has forced research institutes and countries to rethink healthcare delivery solutions to ensure continuity of services while people stay at home and practice social distancing. Recently, several researchers have focused on disruptive technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), to improve the digital healthcare workflow during COVID-19. Blockchain could combat pandemics by enabling decentralized healthcare data sharing, protecting users' privacy, providing data empowerment, and ensuring reliable data management during outbreak tracking. In addition, AI provides intelligent computer-aided solutions by analyzing a patient's medical images and symptoms caused by coronavirus for efficient treatments, future outbreak prediction, and drug manufacturing. Integrating both blockchain and AI could transform the existing healthcare ecosystem by democratizing and optimizing clinical workflows. In this article, we begin with an overview of digital healthcare services and problems that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, we conceptually propose a decentralized, patient-centric healthcare framework based on blockchain and AI to mitigate COVID-19 challenges. Then, we explore the significant applications of integrated blockchain and AI technologies to augment existing public healthcare strategies for tackling COVID-19. Finally, we highlight the challenges and implications for future research within a patient-centric paradigm.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
The healthcare technologies in COVID-19 pandemic had grown immensely in various domains. Blockchain technology is one such turnkey technology, which is transforming the data securely; to store electronic health records (EHRs), develop deep learning algorithms, access the data, process the data between physicians and patients to access the EHRs in the form of distributed ledgers. Blockchain technology is also made to supply the data in the cloud and contact the huge amount of healthcare data, which is difficult and complex to process. As the complexity in the analysis of data is increasing day by day, it has become essential to minimize the risk of data complexity. This paper supports deep neural network (DNN) analysis in healthcare and COVID-19 pandemic and gives the smart contract procedure, to identify the feature extracted data (FED) from the existing data. At the same time, the innovation will be useful to analyse future diseases. The proposed method also analyze the existing diseases which had been reported and it is extremely useful to guide physicians in providing appropriate treatment and save lives. To achieve this, the massive data is integrated using Python scripting language under various libraries to perform a wide range of medical and healthcare functions to infer knowledge that assists in the diagnosis of major diseases such as heart disease, blood cancer, gastric and COVID-19.
Ricardo Carreño Aguilera, Miguel Patiño-Ortiz, ADAN ACOSTA BANDA, LUIS ENRIQUE CARREÑO AGUILERA
This paper relates to the field of Artificial Intelligence, specifically to image recognition, and provides an innovative method to take advantage of Blockchain Convolutional Neural Networks (BCNNs) in Emotion Recognitions (ERs) using audio–visual emotion patterns to determine a healthcare emergency to be attended. BCNN architectures were used to identify emergency patterns. The results obtained indicate that the proposed method is adequate for the classification and identification of audio–visual patterns using deep learning (DL) with Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). It is concluded that it is sufficient to consider the audio–visible key features obtained from the patient’s face and voice of the proposed model to recognize a healthcare emergency for immediate action. “Sense of urgency” and “with urgency but with self-control” are the emotion profiles considered for a healthcare emergency, and user personal emotion profiles are stored in the Blockchain ecosystem since they are deemed sensitive data.
Tamara Islam Meghla, Md. Mahfujur Rahman, Al Amin Biswas, Jeba Tahsin Hossain · 5 authors
Vaccination of the global population against COVID-19 is one of the challenging tasks in supply chain management that humanity has ever faced. The rapid roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine is a must for making the worldwide immunization campaign successful, but its effectiveness depends on the availability of an operational and transparent distribution chain that can be audited by all related stakeholders. In this paper, the necessity of Blockchain and Machine Learning in supply-chain management with demand forecasting of the COVID-19 vaccine has been presented. The aim is to understand how the convergence of Blockchain technology and ML monitor the prerequisite of vaccine distribution with demand forecasting. Here, we have proposed an approach consists of Blockchain and Machine Learning which will be used to ensure the seamless COVID-19 vaccine distribution with transparency, data integrity, and end-to-end traceability for reducing risk, assuring the safety, and also immutability. Besides this, we have performed demand forecasting for appropriate COVID-19 vaccines according to the geographical area and the storage facilities. Lastly, we have discussed research challenges and also mentioning the limitations with future directions.
Chinmay Mistry, Urvish Thakker, Rajesh Gupta, Mohammad S. Obaidat · 7 authors
An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled and blockchain-driven Electronic Health Record (EHR) maintenance system has a tremendous potential to facilitate reliable, secure, and robust storage systems for EHRs. Such an EHR system would also facilitate researchers, doctors, and government authorities to access data for research, perform analytics, and help in making well-informed decisions. The Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is employed to classify the patients as potentially COVID-19 positive and potentially COVID-19 negative based on the clinical reports and reports of CT-scan. The data of potentially COVID-19 positive patients is stored on blockchain employing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. The accessibility of EHR can be done by authorized entities post verification and validation of entities. We analyze the performance of various AI-based algorithms employing metrics such as loss curve, accuracy, etc. for the task of predicting the patient’s potential COVID-19 infection. The 6G network significantly mitigates the network latency and reliability issues and also facilitates the real-time transmission of information. The amount of data generated is pretty high amidst this pandemic and so we employed IPFS protocol which suffices to be a cost-effective solution, moreover satisfying all are stringent requirements. At last, we evaluate the network, security, and storage performance of our architecture MedBlock, which outperformed other state-of-the-art systems.
Hong‐Ning Dai, Yulei Wu, Hao Wang, Muhammad Ali Imran · 5 authors
We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the perception of IoMT as well as the enhanced security and immutability of the blockchain. However, the synergy of IoMT and blockchain is also faced with challenges in privacy, latency, and context-absence. The emerging edge intelligence technologies bring opportunities to tackle these issues. In this article, we present a blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT in addressing the COVID-19 crisis. We first review IoMT, edge intelligence, and blockchain in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We then present an architecture of blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT after discussing the opportunities of integrating blockchain and edge intelligence. We next offer solutions to COVID-19 brought by blockchain-empowered edge intelligence from 1) monitoring and tracing COVID-19 pandemic origin, 2) traceable supply chain of injectable medicines and COVID-19 vaccines, and 3) telemedicine and remote healthcare services. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and open issues in blockchain-empowered edge intelligence.
Tobias Guggenberger, Jannik Lockl, Maximilian Röglinger, Vincent Schlatt · 8 authors
In 2020, the world has witnessed an unprecedented global pandemic with COVID-19. It has led nations to take measures that have an enormous impact on individuals, society, and the economy. Researchers and practitioners responded rapidly, evaluating the opportunities to capitalize on technology for tackling the associated challenges. We investigate the innovative potentials of three emerging digital technologies — namely, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and distributed ledgers — to tackle pandemic-related challenges. We present our findings on the most effective means of leveraging each technology’s potential, the implications for use in crises, and the convergence of the three technologies.
Jan Witowski, Jongmum Choi, Soomin Jeon, Doyun Kim · 9 authors
Current research on medical image processing relies heavily on the amount and quality of input data. Specifically, supervised machine learning methods require well-annotated datasets. A lack of annotation tools limits the potential to achieve high-volume processing and scaled systems with a proper reward mechanism. We developed MarkIt, a web-based tool, for collaborative annotation of medical imaging data with artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. Our platform handles both Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and non-DICOM images, and allows users to annotate them for classification and object detection tasks in an efficient manner. MarkIt can accelerate the annotation process and keep track of user activities to calculate a fair reward. A proof-of-concept experiment was conducted with three fellowship-trained radiologists, each of whom annotated 1,000 chest X-ray studies for multi-label classification. We calculated the inter-rater agreement and estimated the value of the dataset to distribute the reward for annotators using a crypto currency. We hypothesize that MarkIt allows the typically arduous annotation task to become more efficient. In addition, MarkIt can serve as a platform to evaluate the value of data and trade the annotation results in a more scalable manner in the future. The platform is publicly available for testing on https://markit.mgh.harvard.edu.
Open access
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Contagious diseases are prevalent even in the current era of advanced technology. A uniformed initiative is required to build a reliable interactive information exchange service targeting vaccination data management and other medical services. The conventional data exchange mechanism is centralized, creating many vulnerable issues such as a single point failure, data leakage, access control, etc. This article introduces a Blockchain-based medical data-sharing framework (called GlobeChain) to overcome the technical challenges to handle the outbreak records. The challenges that might arise due to the proposed Blockchain-based framework are also presented as a future direction that grabs the proposal's effectiveness.
Safa Otoum, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Hussein T. Mouftah
The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread rapidly in late 2019, has revealed that the use of computing and communication technologies provides significant aid in preventing, controlling, and combating infectious diseases. With the ongoing research in next-generation networking (NGN), the use of secure and reliable communication and networking is of utmost importance when dealing with users' health records and other sensitive information. Through the adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled NGN, the shape of healthcare systems can be altered to achieve smart and secure healthcare capable of coping with epidemics that may emerge at any given moment. In this article, we envision a cooperative and distributed healthcare framework that relies on state-of-the-art computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities, namely, Federated Learning (FL), mobile edge computing (MEC), and Blockchain, to enable epidemic (or suspicious infectious disease) discovery, remote monitoring, and fast health-authority response. The introduced framework can also enable secure medical data exchange at the edge and between different health entities. Such a technique, coupled with the low latency and high bandwidth functionality of 5G and beyond networks, would enable mass surveillance, monitoring and analysis to occur at the edge. Challenges, issues, and design guidelines are also discussed in this article with highlights on some trending solutions.
As COVID-19 hounds the world, the common cause of finding a swift solution to manage the pandemic has brought together researchers, institutions, governments, and society at large. The Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI)-including machine learning (ML) and Big Data analytics-as well as Robotics and Blockchain, are the four decisive areas of technological innovation that have been ingenuity harnessed to fight this pandemic and future ones. While these highly interrelated smart and connected health technologies cannot resolve the pandemic overnight and may not be the only answer to the crisis, they can provide greater insight into the disease and support frontline efforts to prevent and control the pandemic. This article provides a blend of discussions on the contribution of these digital technologies, propose several complementary and multidisciplinary techniques to combat COVID-19, offer opportunities for more holistic studies, and accelerate knowledge acquisition and scientific discoveries in pandemic research. First, four areas, where IoT can contribute are discussed, namely: 1) tracking and tracing; 2) remote patient monitoring (RPM) by wearable IoT (WIoT); 3) personal digital twins (PDTs); and 4) real-life use case: ICT/IoT solution in South Korea. Second, the role and novel applications of AI are explained, namely: 1) diagnosis and prognosis; 2) risk prediction; 3) vaccine and drug development; 4) research data set; 5) early warnings and alerts; 6) social control and fake news detection; and 7) communication and chatbot. Third, the main uses of robotics and drone technology are analyzed, including: 1) crowd surveillance; 2) public announcements; 3) screening and diagnosis; and 4) essential supply delivery. Finally, we discuss how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), of which blockchain is a common example, can be combined with other technologies for tackling COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic situation has proved to be disastrous for humanity throughout the world. However, during this period, people must take precautions for safety purposes. One of the essential steps towards eliminating or reducing the effect of COVID-19 is maintaining social distancing while in public places. Some people are neglecting the social distancing norms while on the move. Still, no surveillance system exists, which monitors the people’s movement for social distancing and securely & efficiently shares the information with the concerned administration department. There also exists no penalty system which forces the people to ensure social distancing. Motivated from the aforementioned facts, in this paper, we present a blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI)-envisioned scheme for monitoring social distancing to combat COVID-19 situations. The proposed scheme uses fast region-based convolutional neural networks (RCNN) and you only look once (YOLO) models for the object (i.e., human) detection through the live video feed captured from the static CCTV cameras as well as lens-equipped drones. Further, the efficient euclidean distance calculation is embedded for calculating the distance between two humans. Blockchain technology ensures the secure and trusted exchange of information between the entities at the physical layer and the administration departments. Blockchain wallets are also used to pay the fine when people do not follow social distance norms. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated based on three broad parameters such as (i) human detection and violation identification, (ii) blockchain simulation and analysis, and (iii) network performance comparison. The parameters considered for (i) is confidence score, for (ii) are scalability, hash rate, and simulation interface, and for (iii) are network bandwidth, throughput, packet loss rate, and network latency. By analyzing all the parameters mentioned above, we observe the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional approaches.