Applied Sciences (Aug 2024)

Efficient and Secure Management of Medical Data Sharing Based on Blockchain Technology

  • Xiangke Mao,
  • Chao Li,
  • Yong Zhang,
  • Guigang Zhang,
  • Chunxiao Xing

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14156816
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 15
p. 6816

Abstract

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In the current landscape of medical data management, processing data across diverse institutions and maximizing their value are paramount. However, traditional methods lack a secure and efficient mechanism for end-to-end traceability and supervision, posing challenges in distributed scenarios lacking mutual trust. Leveraging blockchain’s decentralized, tamper-proof, and traceable features, this paper introduces a blockchain-based medical data management platform. This platform enables full-process management of raw data, operational behaviors, intermediate data, and final data, meeting the needs of trusted storage and supervision of data. We propose two methods, namely, naive method and DAG-based method, to realize forward tracking and backward tracing of medical data stored on the blockchain, respectively. We validated and analyzed the storage and query performance of the medical data management platform on real medical data, and we also conducted experimental analyses on the efficiency of the proposed traceability algorithm under different data scales and processing path lengths. The results demonstrate that our platform and traceability methods effectively meet the management needs of medical data distributed across institutions.

Keywords