FAMHE: New Federated Analytics System Could Be the Game-Changer for Personalized Medicines
The healthcare industry is seeing new changes with the help of innovations in technology.
The entire healthcare industry is based on the four pillars of P called the P4 i.e. Predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory medicines. To improve the industry and its services, the clinical data of every individual must be analyzed first.
Based on the clinical data, the industry can make the required changes. The clinical data means the data of every individual who visited the clinics or medical facilities.
This further strengthens the production departments of the manufacturers of different medicines.
Gathering the data of the individuals is not an easy task and for that reason, a centralized data analytics system must be used by the industry.
Sharing the personal information of the patients invites additional risks. The sensitive information of the patients is what worries them most.
The Solution
To overcome this issue, researchers from EPFL’s laboratory have come up with a solution.
The laboratory for data security works with a team of Lausanne University Hospital, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and MIT CSAIL. The team has developed a new analytics system named “FAMHE”, a federated analytics system.
This system enables healthcare providers to use this system collaboratively to design their own machine learning models for statistical analysis without sharing the real datasets of their patients.
What makes FAMHE a Game-changer?
FAMHE is designed to eliminate the need for sharing the data of the patients which was the only problem. The system is designed to safeguard the privacy, the accuracy of the research results, and the automatic computation of the data collected by the system.
The privacy and other accuracy changes in the healthcare industry are a matter of talk between the researchers. FAMHE and other such models aimed to resolve these issues. However, FAMHE has been proven as the most effective system for data analytics for the healthcare industry.
The team of researchers has also released a post regarding their new Federated Analytics System and its outcomes.
The research data shows the scientific results can be easily achieved without collecting the datasets from the healthcare providers using this system. The study reports claim to have achieved the desired results through the received data.
Jean-Pierre Hubaux, EPFL Professor, Study’s Lead Senior Author has released a statement regarding their new system i.e. FAMHE. The studies show that their model works at scale. The official statement is embedded below:
Until now, no one has been able to reproduce studies that show that federated analytics works at scale. Our results are accurate and are obtained with a reasonable computation time.
FAMHE uses multiparty homomorphic encryption, which is the ability to make computations on the data in its encrypted form across different sources without centralizing the data and without any party seeing the other parties’ data.”
“This technology will not only revolutionize multi-site clinical research studies but also enable and empower collaborations around sensitive data in many different fields such as insurance, financial services, and cyberdefense, among others”
Most universities and hospitals don’t share personal information about their patients due to privacy concerns. However, after establishing this system, they can now easily collaborate and can create their own model with the latest artificial intelligence technology.
As per the University of Lausanne, patients want to share their personal information with such institutes; however, without data confidentiality, sharing the personal information of such patients is not a good move.
The newly invented FAMHE system eliminates this issue as the system lets such data provide work for collaborative researches.
“This is a game-changer towards personalized medicine, because, as long as this kind of solution does not exist, the alternative is to set up bilateral data transfer and use agreements, but these are ad hoc and they take months of discussion to make sure the data is going to be properly protected when this happens.
FAHME provides a solution that makes it possible once and for all to agree on the toolbox to be used and then deploy it”, says Prof. Bonnie Berger of MIT, CSAIL, and Broad.
The new solution is still under its testing phase which means the researchers need to study and re-develop the system with more experiments to make it a complete analytics system.
To develop FAMHE at scale, the doctors and researchers are in talks with partners in various states across the United States along with some countries where the healthcare industry is running smoothly.
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