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1. Apply Trust Computing and Privacy Preserving Smart Contracts to Manage, Share, and Analyze Multi-site Clinical Trial Data

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16035-6_1  

   Wu, Y.; Liu, C.; Sebald, L.; Nguyen, P.; Yesha, Y. (September 2022, Lecture notes in networks and systems)

   Irfan Awan; Muhammad Younas; Jamal Bentahar; Salima Benbernou (Ed.)

   Multi-site clinical trial systems face security challenges when streamlining information sharing while protecting patient privacy. In addition, patient enrollment, transparency, traceability, data integrity, and reporting in clinical trial systems are all critical aspects of maintaining data compliance. A Blockchain-based clinical trial framework has been proposed by lots of researchers and industrial companies recently, but its limitations of lack of data governance, limited confidentiality, and high communication overhead made data-sharing systems insecure and not efficient. We propose 𝖲𝗈𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺, a privacy-preserving smart contracts framework, to manage, share and analyze clinical trial data on fabric private chaincode (FPC). Compared to public Blockchain, fabric has fewer participants with an efficient consensus protocol. 𝖲𝗈𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺 consists of several modules: patient consent and clinical trial approval management chaincode, secure execution for confidential data sharing, API Gateway, and decentralized data governance with adaptive threshold signature (ATS). We implemented two versions of 𝖲𝗈𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺 with non-SGX deploys on AWS blockchain and SGX-based on a local data center. We evaluated the response time for all of the access endpoints on AWS Managed Blockchain, and demonstrated the utilization of SGX-based smart contracts for data sharing and analysis. 

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2. Task-Agnostic Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning for Federated Learning against Attribute Inference Attacks

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i10.28965  

   Arroyo Arevalo, Caridad; Noorbakhsh, Sayedeh Leila; Dong, Yun; Hong, Yuan; Wang, Binghui (March 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Federated learning (FL) has been widely studied recently due to its property to collaboratively train data from different devices without sharing the raw data. Nevertheless, recent studies show that an adversary can still be possible to infer private information about devices' data, e.g., sensitive attributes such as income, race, and sexual orientation. To mitigate the attribute inference attacks, various existing privacy-preserving FL methods can be adopted/adapted. However, all these existing methods have key limitations: they need to know the FL task in advance, or have intolerable computational overheads or utility losses, or do not have provable privacy guarantees. We address these issues and design a task-agnostic privacy-preserving presentation learning method for FL (TAPPFL) against attribute inference attacks. TAPPFL is formulated via information theory. Specifically, TAPPFL has two mutual information goals, where one goal learns task-agnostic data representations that contain the least information about the private attribute in each device's data, and the other goal ensures the learnt data representations include as much information as possible about the device data to maintain FL utility. We also derive privacy guarantees of TAPPFL against worst-case attribute inference attacks, as well as the inherent tradeoff between utility preservation and privacy protection. Extensive results on multiple datasets and applications validate the effectiveness of TAPPFL to protect data privacy, maintain the FL utility, and be efficient as well. Experimental results also show that TAPPFL outperforms the existing defenses. 

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3. Stochastic ADMM Based Distributed Machine Learning with Differential Privacy

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37228-6_13  

   Ding, Jiahao; Errapotu, Sai Mounika; Zhang, Haijun; Gong, Yanmin; Pan, Miao; Han, Zhu (December 2019, Lecture notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering)

   While embracing various machine learning techniques to make effective decisions in the big data era, preserving the privacy of sensitive data poses significant challenges. In this paper, we develop a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning algorithm to address this issue. Given the assumption that each data provider owns a dataset with different sample size, our goal is to learn a common classifier over the union of all the local datasets in a distributed way without leaking any sensitive information of the data samples. Such an algorithm needs to jointly consider efficient distributed learning and effective privacy preservation. In the proposed algorithm, we extend stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) in a distributed setting to do distributed learning. For preserving privacy during the iterative process, we combine differential privacy and stochastic ADMM together. In particular, we propose a novel stochastic ADMM based privacy-preserving distributed machine learning (PS-ADMM) algorithm by perturbing the updating gradients, that provide differential privacy guarantee and have a low computational cost. We theoretically demonstrate the convergence rate and utility bound of our proposed PS-ADMM under strongly convex objective. Through our experiments performed on real-world datasets, we show that PS-ADMM outperforms other differentially private ADMM algorithms under the same differential privacy guarantee. 

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4. mSieve: differential behavioral privacy in time series of mobile sensor data

   https://doi.org/10.1145/2971648.2971753  

   Saleheen, Nazir; Chakraborty, Supriyo; Ali, Nasir; Rahman, Md Mahbubur; Hossain, Syed Monowar; Bari, Rummana; Buder, Eugene; Srivastava, Mani; Kumar, Santosh (January 2016, Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing)

   Differential privacy concepts have been successfully used to protect anonymity of individuals in population-scale analysis. Sharing of mobile sensor data, especially physiological data, raise different privacy challenges, that of protecting private behaviors that can be revealed from time series of sensor data. Existing privacy mechanisms rely on noise addition and data perturbation. But the accuracy requirement on inferences drawn from physiological data, together with well-established limits within which these data values occur, render traditional privacy mechanisms inapplicable. In this work, we define a new behavioral privacy metric based on differential privacy and propose a novel data substitution mechanism to protect behavioral privacy. We evaluate the efficacy of our scheme using 660 hours of ECG, respiration, and activity data collected from 43 participants and demonstrate that it is possible to retain meaningful utility, in terms of inference accuracy (90%), while simultaneously preserving the privacy of sensitive behaviors. 

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5. Multi-dimensional patient acuity estimation with longitudinal EHR tokenization and flexible transformer networks

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2022.1029191  

   Shickel, Benjamin; Silva, Brandon; Ozrazgat-Baslanti, Tezcan; Ren, Yuanfang; Khezeli, Kia; Guan, Ziyuan; Tighe, Patrick J.; Bihorac, Azra; Rashidi, Parisa (November 2022, Frontiers in Digital Health)

   Transformer model architectures have revolutionized the natural language processing (NLP) domain and continue to produce state-of-the-art results in text-based applications. Prior to the emergence of transformers, traditional NLP models such as recurrent and convolutional neural networks demonstrated promising utility for patient-level predictions and health forecasting from longitudinal datasets. However, to our knowledge only few studies have explored transformers for predicting clinical outcomes from electronic health record (EHR) data, and in our estimation, none have adequately derived a health-specific tokenization scheme to fully capture the heterogeneity of EHR systems. In this study, we propose a dynamic method for tokenizing both discrete and continuous patient data, and present a transformer-based classifier utilizing a joint embedding space for integrating disparate temporal patient measurements. We demonstrate the feasibility of our clinical AI framework through multi-task ICU patient acuity estimation, where we simultaneously predict six mortality and readmission outcomes. Our longitudinal EHR tokenization and transformer modeling approaches resulted in more accurate predictions compared with baseline machine learning models, which suggest opportunities for future multimodal data integrations and algorithmic support tools using clinical transformer networks. 

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