Privacy Protection for Medical Image Management Based on Blockchain

Abstract

With the rapid development of medical research and the advance of information technology, Electronic Health Records (EHR) has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its characteristics of easy storage, convenient access, and good shareability. The medical image is one of the most frequently used data format in the EHR data, which is closely relevant to patient personal data and involves many highly sensitive information such as patient names, ID numbers, diagnostic information and telephone numbers. A recent survey reveals that about 24.3 million medical images have been leaked from 50 countries all over the world. Moreover, these medical images can be easily modified or lost during the transmission, which seriously hinders the EHR data sharing. Blockchain is an emerging technology which integrates reliable storage, high security and non-tamperability. In this paper, we propose a privacy protection model that integrates data desensitization and multiple signatures based on blockchain to protect the patient’s medical image data. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method through extensive experiments, the results show that our proposed method achieves desirable performance.