Blockchain-based medical data asset sharing framework for healthcare 4.0

Abstract

To promote the sharing of medical data assets (MDAs) in a more secure and sustainable manner, this article presents a blockchain-based MDA sharing framework. The contributions of this article are threefold. First, we designed a layered-architecture to decouple the privacy-preserving responsibilities among technologies considering the incentive rewarding and parallelization of execution. Second, we introduce zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) in smart contracts with a group signature to construct a supervisory privacy-preserving sharing mechanism, which can be executed in a decentralized environment to protect the privacy of MDAs. Third, we introduce an incentive mechanism that motivates MDA sharing by capturing the decentralized features of the participants to deliver fair rewards. The experiments show that our framework achieves a comprehensive privacy protection on sharing MDAs, comparing with single blockchain sharing schema, with only 2.2% sacrifice on TPS (throughput/second). Moreover, our framework has better potential for large-scale application due to the paralleled execution on ZKP-based smart contracts.