Blockchain-Based Federated Learning in Medicine

Abstract

Worldwide epidemic events have confirmed the need for medical data processing tools while bringing issues of data privacy, transparency and usage consent to the front. Federated Learning and the blockchain are two technologies that tackle these challenges and have been shown to be beneficial in medical contexts where data are often distributed and coming from different sources. In this paper we propose to integrate these two technologies for the first time in a medical setting. In particular, we propose a implementation of a coordinating server for a federated learning algorithm to share information for improved predictions while ensuring data transparency and usage consent. We illustrate the approach with a prediction decision support tool applied to a diabetes data-set. The particular challenges of the medical contexts are detailed and a prototype implementation is presented to validate the solution.