A medical records managing and securing blockchain based system supported by a Genetic Algorithm and Discrete Wavelet Transform

Abstract

The privacy of patients is jeopardised when medical records and data are spread or shared beyond the protected cloud of institutions. This is because breaches force them to the brink that they start abstaining from full disclosure of their condition. This type of condition has a negative effect on scientific research, patients and all stakeholders. A blockchain-based data sharing system is proposed to tackle this issue, which employs immutability and autonomy properties of the blockchain to sufficiently resolve challenges associated with access control and handle sensitive data. Our proposed system is supported by a Discrete Wavelet Transform to enhance the overall security, and a Genetic Algorithm technique to optimise the queuing optimization technique as well. Introducing this cryptographic key generator enhances the immunity and system access control, which allows verifying users securely in a fast way. This design allows further accountability since all users involved are already known and the blockchain records a log of their actions. Only when the users' cryptographic keys and identities are confirmed, the system allows requesting data from the shared queuing requests. The achieved execution time per node, confirmation time per node and robust index for block number of 0.19 second, 0.17 second and 20 respectively that based on system evaluation illustrates that our system is robust, efficient, immune and scalable.

Applications of Blockchain Technology for Data-Sharing in Oncology: Results from a Systematic Literature Review

“…As shown in Table 1, all the selected studies propose to employ BCT in the following application domains: datasharing for primary patient care [2][3][4][5][6]8], conducting medical research [2][3][4][5][6][8][9][10][11], and optimization of the pharmaceutical supply chain processes aiming to ensure the absence of the counterfeit drugs on the market [3,7,12,13]. Most of the proposed approaches are presented as prototypes.…”

“…quirements are taken into account for a stage of system prototyping. Some of these studies [2,[4][5][6] tackle datasharing for both primary care and research, underlying that it is important to involve the patient in the data-sharing process and consider the patient's consent. The work of Mettler [3] tackles all the three application domains, only at the conceptual level.…”

“…In the framework of data-sharing for primary patient care, there is a need to help patients to keep track of and control where their healthcare data are stored [5], to facilitate and speed-up sharing of the required data for the diagnosis and treatment [2], to consolidate the data from multiple sources, to ensure access to the full patient data history, including laboratory results, doses and negative side effects of medications [6]. Zhang et al [4] noticed that enabling patient-controlled data-sharing is especially relevant in the case of regional virtual tumor boards implemented via telemedicine [26,27] for institutions that have limited oncology expertise and resources.…”

“…Based on the identified requirements, the following objectives were defined by the authors of the primary studies: • Meet ONC [28] requirements regarding development of interoperable, privacy-preserving, and secure nationwide health information systems and the promotion of widespread, meaningful use of health IT to improve healthcare [4]. • Facilitate direct verifiable and immutable transactions between the patient as well as different actors in the medical area without relying on a centralized party, while ensuring data security privacy of the distributed sensitive medical data [2,3,6]. • Accelerate the cross-domain biomedical research and clinical trials, incentivize patients to contribute to the research studies, while providing privacy and security guarantees, transparency, and auditability [5,8,10].…”

“…The possibility of using emerging blockchain technology (BCT) for healthcare data management has recently raised major attention in both industries and academia [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that provides a shared, immutable, and transparent append-only register of all the actions that have happened to all the participants of the network.…”