Cloud-Based Privacy-Preserving Medical Imaging System Using Machine Learning Tools

Abstract

Healthcare environments are generating a deluge of sensitive data. Nonetheless, dealing with large amounts of data is an expensive task, and current solutions resort to the cloud environment. Additionally, the intersection of the cloud environment and healthcare data opens new challenges regarding data privacy. With this in mind, we propose MedCloudCare (MCC), a healthcare application offering medical image viewing and processing tools while integrating cloud computing and AI. Moreover, MCC provides security and privacy features, scalability and high availability. The system is intended for two user groups: health professionals and researchers. The former can remotely view, process and share medical imaging information in the DICOM format. Also, it can use pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models to aid the analysis of medical images. The latter can remotely add, share, and deploy ML models to perform inference on DICOM images. MCC incorporates a DICOM web viewer enabling users to view and process DICOM studies, which they can also upload and store. Regarding the security and privacy of the data, all sensitive information is encrypted at rest and in transit. Furthermore, MCC is intended for cloud environments. Thus, the system is deployed using Kubernetes, increasing the efficiency, availability and scalability of the ML inference process.