Multi-Continental Healthcare Modelling Using Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning
This work addresses privacy and data-sharing barriers in global healthcare AI, enabling international collaborations to reduce bias and improve models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing federated learning and blockchain methods.
The paper tackled the challenge of data sharing in healthcare AI by proposing a blockchain-enabled federated learning framework for multi-continental glucose management, achieving comparable or slightly better accuracy than centralized training while preserving privacy.
One of the biggest challenges of building artificial intelligence (AI) model in the healthcare area is the data sharing. Since healthcare data is private, sensitive, and heterogeneous, collecting sufficient data for modelling is exhausting, costly, and sometimes impossible. In this paper, we propose a framework for global healthcare modelling using datasets from multi-continents (Europe, North America, and Asia) without sharing the local datasets, and choose glucose management as a study model to verify its effectiveness. Technically, blockchain-enabled federated learning is implemented with adaptation to meet the privacy and safety requirements of healthcare data, meanwhile, it rewards honest participation and penalizes malicious activities using its on-chain incentive mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is effective, efficient, and privacy-preserving. Its prediction accuracy consistently outperforms models trained on limited personal data and achieves comparable or even slightly better results than centralized training in certain scenarios, all while preserving data privacy. This work paves the way for international collaborations on healthcare projects, where additional data is crucial for reducing bias and providing benefits to humanity.