Summary

The digital revolution, in particular big data and artificial intelligence (AI), offers new opportunities to transform healthcare. However, it also harbours risks to the security of sensitive clinical data stored in critical healthcare ICT infrastructure. In particular data exchange over the internet is perceived as insurmountable posing a roadblock that is hampering big data-based medical innovations. FeatureCloud’s transformative security-by-design concept will minimize the cyber-crime potential and enable the first secure cross-border collaborative data mining endeavour. FeatureCloud will be implemented into a software toolkit for substantially reducing cyber risks to healthcare infrastructure by employing the world-wide first privacy-aware federated all-in-one approach, which has two key characteristics: (1) no sensitive data is communicated through any communication channels, and (2) data is not stored in one central point of attack.

Federated machine learning (for privacy-preserving data mining) integrated with blockchain technology (for immutability and management of patient rights) will safely apply next-generation AI technology for medical purposes. Importantly, patients will be given effective means of revoking previously given consent at any time. Our ground-breaking new cloud-AI infrastructure only exchanges learned model representations that are anonymous by default. Collectively, our highly interdisciplinary consortium from IT to medicine covers all aspects of the value chain: assessment of cyber risks, legal considerations and international policies, development of federated AI technology coupled to blockchaining, app store, and user interface design, implementation as certifiable prognostic medical devices, evaluation and translation into clinical practice, commercial exploitation, as well as dissemination and patient trust maximization. FeatureCloud’s goals are bold, necessary, achievable, and paving the way for a socially agreeable big data era of the Medicine 4.0 age.

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