Abstract
Misdiagnosis is a critical issue in healthcare, which can lead to severe consequences for patients, including delayed or inappropriate treatment, unnecessary procedures, psychological distress, financial burden, and legal implications. To mitigate this issue, we propose using deep learning algorithms to improve diagnostic accuracy. However, building accurate deep learning models for medical diagnosis requires substantial amounts of high-quality data, which can be challenging for individual healthcare sectors or organizations to acquire. Therefore, combining data from multiple sources to create a diverse dataset for efficient training is needed. However, sharing medical data between different healthcare sectors can be problematic from a security standpoint due to sensitive information and privacy laws. To address these challenges, we propose using blockchain technology to provide a secure, decentralized, and privacy-respecting way to share locally trained deep learning models instead of the data itself. Our proposed method of model ensembling, which combines the weights of several local deep learning models to build a single global model, that enables accurate diagnosis of complex medical conditions across multiple locations while preserving patient privacy and data security. Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in accurately diagnosing three diseases (breast cancer, lung cancer, and diabetes) with high accuracy rates, surpassing the accuracy of local models and building a multi-diagnosis application.
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Data availability
The datasets used in this study were obtained from publicly available sources. The breast cancer dataset is available on UCI Machine Learning Repository [7] and Kaggle [8], the Lung cancer dataset is available on data.world [9] and Kaggle [10], and the Diabetes dataset is available on UCI Machine Learning Repository [11] and Kaggle [12].
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Hakima Rym Rahal wrote the main manuscript text and prepared all the figures and tables under the supervision of Sihem Slatnia, Okba Kazar, Ezedin Barka, and Saad Harous. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Rahal, H.R., Slatnia, S., Kazar, O. et al. Blockchain-based multi-diagnosis deep learning application for various diseases classification. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 23, 15–30 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-023-00733-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-023-00733-8