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 Placzek, Peter


Bringing the Algorithms to the Data -- Secure Distributed Medical Analytics using the Personal Health Train (PHT-meDIC)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The need for data privacy and security - enforced through increasingly strict data protection regulations - renders the use of healthcare data for machine learning difficult. In particular, the transfer of data between different hospitals is often not permissible and thus cross-site pooling of data not an option. The Personal Health Train (PHT) paradigm proposed within the GO-FAIR initiative implements an'algorithm to the data' paradigm that ensures that distributed data can be accessed for analysis without transferring any sensitive data. We present PHT-meDIC, a productively deployed open-source implementation of the PHT concept. Containerization allows us to easily deploy even complex data analysis pipelines (e.g, genomics, image analysis) across multiple sites in a secure and scalable manner. We discuss the underlying technological concepts, security models, and governance processes. The implementation has been successfully applied to distributed analyses of large-scale data, including applications of deep neural networks to medical image data. Keywords: Distributed Learning, Healthcare Machine Learning, Data Privacy, Biomedical Informatics, Healthcare Big Data.