48 research outputs found
Private Predictive Analysis on Encrypted Medical Data
Increasingly, confidential medical records are being stored in data centers hosted by hospitals or large companies. As sophisticated algorithms for predictive analysis on medical data continue to be developed, it is likely that, in the future, more and more computation will be done on private patient data. While encryption provides a tool for assuring the privacy of medical information, it limits the functionality for operating on such data. Conventional
encryption methods used today provide only very restricted possibilities or none at all to operate on encrypted data without decrypting it first. Homomorphic encryption provides a tool for
handling such computations on encrypted data, without decrypting the data, and without even needing the decryption key.
In this paper, we discuss possible application scenarios for homomorphic encryption in order to ensure privacy of sensitive medical data. We describe how to privately conduct predictive analysis tasks on encrypted data using homomorphic encryption. As a proof of concept, we present a working implementation of a prediction service running in the cloud (hosted on Microsoft\u27s Windows Azure), which takes as input private encrypted health data, and returns the probability of suffering cardiovascular disease in encrypted form. Since the cloud service uses homomorphic encryption, it makes this prediction while handling only encrypted data, learning nothing about
the submitted confidential medical data
On the Use of XML in Medical Imaging Web-Based Applications
The rapid growth of digital technology in medical fields over recent years has increased the need for applications able to manage patient medical records, imaging data, and chart information. Web-based applications are implemented with the purpose to link digital databases, storage and transmission protocols, management of large volumes of data and security concepts, allowing the possibility to read, analyze, and even diagnose remotely from the medical center where the information was acquired. The objective of this paper is to analyze the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) language in web-based applications that aid in diagnosis or treatment of patients, considering how this protocol allows indexing and exchanging the huge amount of information associated with each medical case. The purpose of this paper is to point out the main advantages and drawbacks of the XML technology in order to provide key ideas for future web-based applicationsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Conditionals in Homomorphic Encryption and Machine Learning Applications
Homomorphic encryption aims at allowing computations on encrypted data
without decryption other than that of the final result. This could provide an
elegant solution to the issue of privacy preservation in data-based
applications, such as those using machine learning, but several open issues
hamper this plan. In this work we assess the possibility for homomorphic
encryption to fully implement its program without relying on other techniques,
such as multiparty computation (SMPC), which may be impossible in many use
cases (for instance due to the high level of communication required). We
proceed in two steps: i) on the basis of the structured program theorem
(Bohm-Jacopini theorem) we identify the relevant minimal set of operations
homomorphic encryption must be able to perform to implement any algorithm; and
ii) we analyse the possibility to solve -- and propose an implementation for --
the most fundamentally relevant issue as it emerges from our analysis, that is,
the implementation of conditionals (requiring comparison and selection/jump
operations). We show how this issue clashes with the fundamental requirements
of homomorphic encryption and could represent a drawback for its use as a
complete solution for privacy preservation in data-based applications, in
particular machine learning ones. Our approach for comparisons is novel and
entirely embedded in homomorphic encryption, while previous studies relied on
other techniques, such as SMPC, demanding high level of communication among
parties, and decryption of intermediate results from data-owners. Our protocol
is also provably safe (sharing the same safety as the homomorphic encryption
schemes), differently from other techniques such as
Order-Preserving/Revealing-Encryption (OPE/ORE).Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure, corrected typos, added introductory pedagogical
section on polynomial approximatio
Encrypted statistical machine learning: new privacy preserving methods
We present two new statistical machine learning methods designed to learn on
fully homomorphic encrypted (FHE) data. The introduction of FHE schemes
following Gentry (2009) opens up the prospect of privacy preserving statistical
machine learning analysis and modelling of encrypted data without compromising
security constraints. We propose tailored algorithms for applying extremely
random forests, involving a new cryptographic stochastic fraction estimator,
and na\"{i}ve Bayes, involving a semi-parametric model for the class decision
boundary, and show how they can be used to learn and predict from encrypted
data. We demonstrate that these techniques perform competitively on a variety
of classification data sets and provide detailed information about the
computational practicalities of these and other FHE methods.Comment: 39 page
The Potential for Machine Learning Analysis over Encrypted Data in Cloud-based Clinical Decision Support - Background and Review
This paper appeared at the 8th Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2015), Sydney, Australia, January 2015. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT), Vol. 164, Anthony Maeder and Jim Warren, Ed. Reproduction for academic, not-for profit purposes permitted provided this text is includedIn an effort to reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure in untrusted networks such as the public cloud, increasing attention has recently been given to encryption schemes that allow specific computations to occur on encrypted data, without the need for decryption. This relies on the fact that some encryption algorithms display the property of homomorphism, which allows them to manipulate data in a meaningful way while still in encrypted form. Such a framework would find particular relevance in Clinical Decision Support (CDS) applications deployed in the public cloud. CDS applications have an important computational and analytical role over confidential healthcare information with the aim of supporting decision-making in clinical practice. This review paper examines the history and current status of homomoprhic encryption and its potential for preserving the privacy of patient data underpinning cloud-based CDS applications
Semantic wikis as flexible database interfaces for biomedical applications
Several challenges prevent extracting knowledge from biomedical resources, including data heterogeneity and the difficulty to obtain and collaborate on data and annotations by medical doctors. Therefore, flexibility in their representation and interconnection is required; it is also essential to be able to interact easily with such data. In recent years, semantic tools have been developed: semantic wikis are collections of wiki pages that can be annotated with properties and so combine flexibility and expressiveness, two desirable aspects when modeling databases, especially in the dynamic biomedical domain. However, semantics and collaborative analysis of biomedical data is still an unsolved challenge. The aim of this work is to create a tool for easing the design and the setup of semantic databases and to give the possibility to enrich them with biostatistical applications. As a side effect, this will also make them reproducible, fostering their application by other research groups. A command-line software has been developed for creating all structures required by Semantic MediaWiki. Besides, a way to expose statistical analyses as R Shiny applications in the interface is provided, along with a facility to export Prolog predicates for reasoning with external tools. The developed software allowed to create a set of biomedical databases for the Neuroscience Department of the University of Padova in a more automated way. They can be extended with additional qualitative and statistical analyses of data, including for instance regressions, geographical distribution of diseases, and clustering. The software is released as open source-code and published under the GPL-3 license at https://github.com/mfalda/tsv2swm