Securing Reproducibility and Accountability in Distributed Healthcare Analytics: A Framework Based on Blockchain and Cryptography.

ABSTRACT

The results and details of the clinical studies and research must be securely stored to ensure reliability, accountability, and prevent malicious misuse. To accomplish this, a secure method for storing metadata and study results is crucial. Also, a mechanism to ensure accountability for both data owners and researchers is needed. In this way, data owners and the scientific community can rely on and verify results and methods presented by researchers, while researchers can check the validity of the analyzed data and have proof of authorship for their work. A modular framework is presented in this paper, which utilizes blockchain and cryptography to store study results and metadata, along with proof of accountability. The framework has been tested within a privacy-preserving distributed analytics infrastructure.