Blockchain and artificial intelligence are two technologies that, when combined, have the ability to help each other realize their full potential. Blockchains can guarantee the accessibility and consistent admittance to integrity safeguarded big data indexes from numerous areas, allowing AI systems to learn more effectively and thoroughly. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to offer new consensus processes, and hence new methods of engaging with Blockchains. When it comes to sensitive data, such as corporate, healthcare, and financial data, various security and privacy problems arise that must be properly evaluated. Interaction with Blockchains is vulnerable to data credibility checks, transactional data leakages, data protection rules compliance, on-chain data privacy, and malicious smart contracts. To solve these issues, new security and privacy-preserving technologies are being developed. AI-based blockchain data processing, either based on AI or used to defend AI-based blockchain data processing, is emerging to simplify the integration of these two cutting-edge technologies.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
The digital transformation is characterized by the convergence of technologies—from the Internet of Things (IoT) to edge–fog–cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and Blockchain—in multiple dimensions, blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds. Although these innovations have evolved independently over time, they are increasingly becoming more intertwined, driving the development of new business models. With more adaptation, embracement, and development, we are witnessing a steady convergence and fusion of these technologies resulting in an unprecedented paradigm shift that is expected to disrupt and reshape the next-generation systems in vertical domains in a way that the capabilities of the technologies are aligned in the best possible way to complement each other. Despite the fact that the convergence of the four technologies can potentially tackle the main shortcomings of the existing systems, its adoption is still in its infancy phase, suffering from several issues, such as the absence of consensus toward any reference models or best practices. This article provides a comprehensive insight into the fusions of these paradigms by discussing a blend of topics addressing all the importation aspects from design to deployment. We will begin this article by providing an in-depth discussion on the main requirements, state-of-the-art reference architectures, applications, and challenges. Following this, we will present a reference architecture and a case study on privacy-preserving stress monitoring and management to better elaborate on the corresponding details and considerations.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Pronaya Bhattacharya, Mohammad S. Obaidat, Darshan Savaliya, Sakshi Sanghavi · 6 authors
Smart healthcare has transitioned towards health-care 5.0, which allows ambient tracking of patients, emotive telemedicine, telesurgery, wellness monitoring, virtual clinics, and personalized care. Thus, the metaverse is a potential tool to leverage digital connectivity via improved healthcare experience in virtual environments. However, despite its potential benefits, patient’s sensitive information is captured, and digital avatars are created that interact with healthcare stakeholders for connected virtual care. As metaverse components are decentralized, blockchain (BC) is a potential solution to induce transparency and immutability in stored transactions on metaverse. For clinical decision support in BC-assisted metaverse enabled, Healthcare 5.0, accurate and interpretable diagnosis is critical. Thus, explainable AI (xAI) forms another critical component that provides trust in the healthcare informatics front. A dual solution of trusted informatics is possible via the interplay of BC and xAI in metaverse-enabled Healthcare 5.0. The article investigates the interplay through a proposed telesurgical scheme between patients, virtual hospitals, and doctors. Next, we discuss the potential challenges and present an experimental use-case of the benefits of our proposed architecture over traditional telesurgery systems.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
A S Manjunatha, S Arpith, G M Mufeed, K R Anusha · 5 authors
In the current healthcare environment, they lock the patient records in multiple centralized systems which are maintained by the different healthcare institutions. So, the complete, comprehensive medical data history of the patient is locked away, making it difficult for doctors to make informed decisions. Our system aims at tackling these issues using a decentralized system to store the patient's record. The patient and the doctor/healthcare institutions use a Decentralized Application as an interface to the Blockchain network. When a patient visits the doctor, the patient can give access to his/her medical data through this Decentralized Application via an Ethereum smart contract. Once the patient gives access, the doctor can access all the patient's medical records and history in one unified interface. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are used to give a tailored medical experience to the patients. With rich data that is available from the users' network, can be fed into the Machine Learning models to do various levels of analysis to give patients and doctors further insight into the medical records.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
With the SARS-CoV-2's exponential growth, intelligent and constructive practice is required to diagnose the COVID-19. The rapid spread of the virus and the shortage of reliable testing models are considered major issues in detecting COVID-19. This problem remains the peak burden for clinicians. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in image processing, the burden of diagnosing the COVID-19 cases has been reduced to acceptable thresholds. But traditional AI techniques often require centralized data storage and training for the predictive model development which increases the computational complexity. The real-world challenge is to exchange data globally across hospitals while also taking into account of the organizations' privacy concerns. Collaborative model development and privacy protection are critical considerations while training a global deep learning model. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework based on blockchain and the federated learning model. The federated learning model takes care of reduced complexity, and blockchain helps in distributed data with privacy maintained. More precisely, the proposed federated learning ensembled deep five learning blockchain model (FLED-Block) framework collects the data from the different medical healthcare centers, develops the model with the hybrid capsule learning network, and performs the prediction accurately, while preserving the privacy and shares among authorized persons. Extensive experimentation has been carried out using the lung CT images and compared the performance of the proposed model with the existing VGG-16 and 19, Alexnets, Resnets-50 and 100, Inception V3, Densenets-121, 119, and 150, Mobilenets, SegCaps in terms of accuracy (98.2%), precision (97.3%), recall (96.5%), specificity (33.5%), and F1-score (97%) in predicting the COVID-19 with effectively preserving the privacy of the data among the heterogeneous users.
Open access
COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Yang Zhang, Yongquan Liang, Bin Jia, Pinxiang Wang · 5 authors
Aiming to address the unsatisfactory performance of existing distributed deep learning architectures, such as poor accuracy, slow network communication, low arithmetic speed, and insufficient security, we propose and design a learning model based on a distributed deep learning and blockchain architecture. We use a hybrid parallel algorithm based on blockchain (HP-B) to build a distributed deep consensus learning model. The HP-B algorithm is grouped according to the performance of computing nodes participating in training, network links and training samples, and the grouped computing equipment performs optimal distributed computing. The purpose of this approach is to solve the security and scalability concerns and improve the convergence speed and accuracy of deep learning. The proposed method achieves good results on the CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, and IMAGENET data sets. Finally, the distributed deep learning model based on blockchain is combined with the generative adversarial network to solve the segmentation problem of medical imaging data, and the experimental results are superior to those of other networks.
Brain Tumor Detection and Classification
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Abstract Healthcare institutions are progressively integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations. The extraordinary potential of AI is restricted by insufficient medical data for AI model training and adversarial attacks wherein attackers perturb the dataset by adding some noise to it, which leads to the malfunctioning of the AI models, and a lack of trust caused by the opaque operational approach it employs. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a state‐of‐the‐art survey of the research on blockchain technology for securing AI‐integrated healthcare applications. The most relevant articles from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases were identified using the PRISMA model. Most of the existing literature is about protecting the healthcare data used by AI‐based healthcare systems using blockchain technology, but the modality of data (text, images, audio, and sound) was not specifically mentioned. Information on protecting the training phase and model deployment for AI‐based healthcare systems considering the variations in feature extraction based on the modality of data was also not clearly specified. Hence, the three subfields of AI, namely, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and acoustic AI are further studied to identify security loopholes in its implementation pipeline. The three phases, namely the dataset, the training phase, and the trained models need to be protected from adversaries to avoid malfunctioning of the deployed AI models. The nature of the data processed by NLP, computer vision, and acoustic AI, underlying deep neural network (DNN) architectures, the complexity of attacks, and the perceivability of attacks by humans are analyzed to identify the need for security. A blockchain solution for AI‐based healthcare systems is synthesized based on the findings that have demonstrated the distinctive technological features of blockchains. It offers a solution for the privacy and security issues encountered by NLP, computer vision, and acoustic AI to boost the widespread adoption of AI applications in healthcare.
G. Ramesh, Avinash Sharma, D. V. Lalitha Parameswari, Ch. Mallikarjuna Rao · 5 authors
Biomedical databases or repositories have scientific information that is evidence based and protecting such documents from tampering or non-repudiation is very significant. The traditional techniques for the same have limitations in the distributed environments. Scientific contributions are to be safeguarded and it is one of the challenging problems. Blockchain is the promising technology that can support distributed ledger of transactions and thus it is found suitable for protecting biomedical repositories. As blockchain is a proven technology associated with crypto-currency known as Bitcoin in finance domain, it has plenty of opportunities in other domains. In this paper, a framework that is based on blockchain technology (BCT) for protection of biomedical databases with integrity and non-repudiation is presented. The framework will have underlying mechanisms to exploit blockchain to have a protection service and smart contracts to be more flexible and dynamic to adapt new requirements from time to time. The framework is domain specific but can pave way for motivation for adapting it to new domains as well.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Ana Côrte-Real, Tiago Nunes, Clara Cruz Santos, Paulo Rupino da Cunha
The increase of forcibly displaced people worldwide is a challenge for health systems and their ability to provide access and equity in Health as a universal right. Health information systems should be strengthened to collect and disseminate migrant health data enabling analytics for strategic decisions.This Viewpoint focuses on blockchain technology as an emergent digital tool to improve communication and overcome gaps in medical data sharing, conceptualizing a global health space. Anchored in the security, privacy, and medico-legal regulation of medical data, Blockchain technology would empower inter-organizational services or workflows, in real-time, by the users, inside and outside the national health systems, anywhere in the world. As an innovative approach, this Viewpoint highlights the future directions in IT-supported health.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Medical Cyber-Physical Systems support the mobility of electronic health records data for clinical research to accelerate new scientific discoveries. Artificial Intelligence improves medical informatics, but current centralized data training and insecure data storage management techniques expose private medical data to unauthorized foreign entities. In this paper, a Federated Learning-based Electronic Health Record sharing scheme is proposed for Medical Informatics to preserve patient data privacy. A decentralized Federated Learning-based Convolutional Neural Network model trains data locally in the hospital and stores results in a private InterPlanetary File System. A secondary global model is trained at the research center using the local models. Private IPFS secures all medical data stored locally in the hospital. The novelty of this study resides in securing valuable hospital biomedical data useful for clinical research organizations. Blockchain and smart contracts enable patients to negotiate with external entities for rewards in exchange for their data. Evaluation results demonstrate that the decentralized CNN model performs better in accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, similar to the traditional centralized model. The performance of the Private IPFS exceeds the Blockchain-based IPFS based on file upload and download time. The scheme is suitable for promoting a secure and privacy-friendly environment for sharing data with clinical research centers for biomedical research.
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Ioannis Skalidis, Olivier Müller, Stéphane Fournier
The recent pandemic launched an acceleration in adopting telemedicine by cardiovascular health and triggered the flourishing of technological advancements, such as the metaverse, which is a novel interactive mix of digital worlds that leverages augmented reality with virtual reality. The CardioVerse represents a theoretical term for the embracement of the metaverse by cardiovascular medicine, encompassing the endless possibilities as well as the challenges that it holds and introduces new dimensions to disease education, prevention and diagnosis. Its applications are numerous, notably in enhancing medical visits, assisting cardiovascular interventions and reshaping the way medical education is provided. Although obstacles are expected in diverse domains such as security, technical, legislative and regulatory, the utilization of non-fungible tokens as a security asset for patient data appears as potential solution.
Open access
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Mustafa Abdul‐Moheeth, Muhammad Usman, Daniel Toshio Harrell, Anjum Khurshid
Background: The current healthcare ecosystem in the United States is plagued by inefficiencies in transitions of patient care between healthcare providers due in large part to a lack of interoperability among the many electronic medical record (EMR) systems that exist today. Both providers and patients experience significant frustration due to the negative effects of increased costs, unnecessary administrative burden, and duplication of services that occur because of data fragmentation in the system. Blockchain technology provides a potential solution to mitigate or eliminate these gaps by allowing for exchange of healthcare information that is distributed, auditable, immutable, and respectful of patient autonomy. Our multidisciplinary team identified key tasks required for a transition of care to design and develop a blockchain application, MediLinker, which served as a patient-centric identity management system to address issues of data fragmentation ultimately aiding in the delivery of high-value care services. Methods: The MediLinker application was evaluated for its ability to accomplish various key tasks needed for a successful transition of patient care in an outpatient setting. Our team created 20 unique patient use cases covering a diversity of medical needs and social circumstances that were played out by participants who were asked to perform various tasks as they received case across a simulated healthcare ecosystem composed of four clinics, a research institution, and other ancillary public services. Tasks included, but were not limited to, clinic enrollment, verification of identity, medication reconciliation, sharing insurance and billing information, and updating demographic information. With this iteration of MediLinker, we specifically focused on the functionality of digital guardianship and patient revocation of healthcare information. In addition, throughout the simulation, we surveyed participant perceptions regarding the use of MediLinker and blockchain technology to better ascertain comfortability and usability of the application. Results: Quantitative evaluation of simulation results revealed that MediLinker was able to successfully accomplish all seven clinical scenarios tested across the 20 patient use cases. MediLinker successfully achieved its goal of patient-centered interoperability as participants transitioned their simulated healthcare data, including COVID-19 vaccination status and current medications, across the four clinic sites and research institution. In addition to completing all key tasks designated, all eligible participants were able to enroll with and subsequently revoke data access with our simulated research site. MediLinker had a low data-entry error rate, with most errors occurring due to work-flow vulnerabilities. Our qualitative analysis of user perceptions indicated that comfortability and trust with blockchain technology, such as MediLinker, grew with increased education and exposure to such technology. Conclusions: The ubiquitous problem of data fragmentation in our current healthcare ecosystem has placed considerable strain on providers and patients alike. Blockchain applications for health identity management, such as MediLinker, provide a viable solution to stem the inefficiencies that exist today. The interoperability that MediLinker provided across our simulated healthcare system has the potential to improve transitions of care by sharing key aspects of healthcare information in a timely, secure, and patent-centric fashion allowing for the delivery of consistent and personalized high value care. Blockchain technologies appear to face similar challenges to widespread adoption as other novel interventions, namely recognition, trust, and usability. Further development and scaling are required for such technology to realize its full potential in the real world and transform the practice of modern health care.
Open access
Electronic Health Records Systems
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Blockchain usage in healthcare, in radiology, in particular, is at its very early infancy. Only a few research applications have been tested, however, blockchain technology is widely known outside healthcare and widely adopted, especially in Finance, since 2009 at least. Learning by history, radiology is a potential ideal scenario to apply this technology. Blockchain could have the potential to increase radiological data value in both clinical and research settings for the patient digital record, radiological reports, privacy control, quantitative image analysis, cybersecurity, radiomics and artificial intelligence.Up-to-date experiences using blockchain in radiology are still limited, but radiologists should be aware of the emergence of this technology and follow its next developments. We present here the potentials of some applications of blockchain in radiology.
Open access
Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging
Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Sin Kit Lo, Yue Liu, Qinghua Lu, Chen Wang · 7 authors
Federated learning is an emerging privacy-preserving AI technique where clients (i.e., organizations or devices) train models locally and formulate a global model based on the local model updates without transferring local data externally. However, federated learning systems struggle to achieve trustworthiness and embody responsible AI principles. In particular, federated learning systems face accountability and fairness challenges due to multistakeholder involvement and heterogeneity in client data distribution. To enhance the accountability and fairness of federated learning systems, we present a blockchain-based trustworthy federated learning architecture. We first design a smart contract-based data-model provenance registry to enable accountability. Additionally, we propose a weighted fair data sampler algorithm to enhance fairness in training data. We evaluate the proposed approach using a COVID-19 X-ray detection use case. The evaluation results show that the approach is feasible to enable accountability and improve fairness. The proposed algorithm can achieve better performance than the default federated learning setting in terms of the model’s generalization and accuracy.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
With the increasing number of coronavirus disease 2019 cases and worldwide vaccination coverage, 'vaccination passports' (vaccination certificates) may become a required permit for global travel, thereby supporting economic recovery. On March 7, 2021, Wang Yi, State Councilor and Foreign Minister of China, announced the launch of the Chinese version of an 'international travel health certificate' at a press conference of the National People's Congress and the Chinese Political Consultative Conference. He proposed a feasible 'Chinese solution' for promoting the recovery of the global economy and the facilitation of cross-border travel, and hoped that the international travel health certificate and vaccination passport can be mutually authenticated. The Israeli government issued a
Open access
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Electronic health records (EHRs) are digitally saved health records that provide information about a person’s health. EHRs are generally shared among healthcare stakeholders, and thus are susceptible to power failures, data misuse, a lack of privacy, security, and an audit trail, among other problems. Blockchain, on the other hand, is a groundbreaking technology that provides a distributed and decentralized environment in which nodes in a list of networks can connect to each other without the need for a central authority. It has the potential to overcome the limits of EHR management and create a more secure, decentralized, and safer environment for exchanging EHR data. Further, blockchain is a distributed ledger on which data can be stored and shared in a cryptographically secure, validated, and mutually agreed-upon manner across all mining nodes. The blockchain stores data with a high level of integrity and robustness, and it cannot be altered. When smart contracts are used to make decisions and conduct analytics with machine-learning algorithms, the results may be trusted and unquestioned. However, Blockchain is not always indestructible and suffers from scalability and complexity issues that might render it inefficient. Combining AI and blockchain technology can handled some of the drawbacks of these two technical ecosystems effectively. AI algorithms rely on data or information to learn, analyze, and reach conclusions. The performance of AI algorithms is enhanced through the data obtained from a data repository or a reliable, secure, trustworthy, and credible platform. Researchers have identified three categories of blockchain-based potential solutions for the management of electronic health records: conceptual, prototype, and implemented. The purpose of this research work is to conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify and assess research articles that were either conceptual or implemented to manage EHRs using blockchain technology. The study conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the literature on blockchain technology and enhanced health record management systems utilizing artificial intelligence technologies. The study examined 189 research papers collected from various publication categories. The in-depth analysis focuses on the privacy, security, accessibility, and scalability of publications. The SLR has illustrated that blockchain technology has the potential to deliver decentralization, security, and privacy that are frequently lacking in traditional EHRs. Additionally, the outcomes of the extensive analysis inform future researchers about the type of blockchain to use in their research. Additionally, methods used in healthcare are summarized per application area while their pros and cons are highlighted. Finally, the emphasized taxonomy combines blockchain and artificial intelligence, which enables us to analyze possible blockchain and artificial intelligence applications in health records management systems. The article ends with a discussion on open issues for research and future directions.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education