SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem
Abstract Background The kidney exchange problem (KEP) addresses the matching of patients in need for a replacement organ with compatible living donors. Ideally many medical institutions should participate in a matching program to increase the chance for successful matches. However, to fulfill legal...
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
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BMC
2022-09-01
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Series: | BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making |
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Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01994-4 |
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author | Timm Birka Kay Hamacher Tobias Kussel Helen Möllering Thomas Schneider |
author_facet | Timm Birka Kay Hamacher Tobias Kussel Helen Möllering Thomas Schneider |
author_sort | Timm Birka |
collection | DOAJ |
description | Abstract Background The kidney exchange problem (KEP) addresses the matching of patients in need for a replacement organ with compatible living donors. Ideally many medical institutions should participate in a matching program to increase the chance for successful matches. However, to fulfill legal requirements current systems use complicated policy-based data protection mechanisms that effectively exclude smaller medical facilities to participate. Employing secure multi-party computation (MPC) techniques provides a technical way to satisfy data protection requirements for highly sensitive personal health information while simultaneously reducing the regulatory burdens. Results We have designed, implemented, and benchmarked SPIKE, a secure MPC-based privacy-preserving KEP protocol which computes a locally optimal solution by finding matching donor–recipient pairs in a graph structure. SPIKE matches 40 pairs in cycles of length 2 in less than 4 min and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art protocol by a factor of $$400\times$$ 400 × in runtime while providing medically more robust solutions. Conclusions We show how to solve the KEP in a robust and privacy-preserving manner achieving significantly more practical performance than the current state-of-the-art (Breuer et al., WPES’20 and CODASPY’22). The usage of MPC techniques fulfills many data protection requirements on a technical level, allowing smaller health care providers to directly participate in a kidney exchange with reduced legal processes. As sensitive data are not leaving the institutions’ network boundaries, the patient data underlie a higher level of protection than in the currently employed (centralized) systems. Furthermore, due to reduced legal barriers, the proposed decentralized system might be simpler to implement in a transnational, intereuropean setting with mixed (national) data protecion laws. |
first_indexed | 2024-04-11T11:37:21Z |
format | Article |
id | doaj.art-ec9f46f4b806488aa414df21c3fc326e |
institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
issn | 1472-6947 |
language | English |
last_indexed | 2024-04-11T11:37:21Z |
publishDate | 2022-09-01 |
publisher | BMC |
record_format | Article |
series | BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making |
spelling | doaj.art-ec9f46f4b806488aa414df21c3fc326e2022-12-22T04:25:56ZengBMCBMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making1472-69472022-09-0122112110.1186/s12911-022-01994-4SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problemTimm Birka0Kay Hamacher1Tobias Kussel2Helen Möllering3Thomas Schneider4ENCRYPTO, Technical University of DarmstadtComputational Biology and Simulation group, Technical University of DarmstadtComputational Biology and Simulation group, Technical University of DarmstadtENCRYPTO, Technical University of DarmstadtENCRYPTO, Technical University of DarmstadtAbstract Background The kidney exchange problem (KEP) addresses the matching of patients in need for a replacement organ with compatible living donors. Ideally many medical institutions should participate in a matching program to increase the chance for successful matches. However, to fulfill legal requirements current systems use complicated policy-based data protection mechanisms that effectively exclude smaller medical facilities to participate. Employing secure multi-party computation (MPC) techniques provides a technical way to satisfy data protection requirements for highly sensitive personal health information while simultaneously reducing the regulatory burdens. Results We have designed, implemented, and benchmarked SPIKE, a secure MPC-based privacy-preserving KEP protocol which computes a locally optimal solution by finding matching donor–recipient pairs in a graph structure. SPIKE matches 40 pairs in cycles of length 2 in less than 4 min and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art protocol by a factor of $$400\times$$ 400 × in runtime while providing medically more robust solutions. Conclusions We show how to solve the KEP in a robust and privacy-preserving manner achieving significantly more practical performance than the current state-of-the-art (Breuer et al., WPES’20 and CODASPY’22). The usage of MPC techniques fulfills many data protection requirements on a technical level, allowing smaller health care providers to directly participate in a kidney exchange with reduced legal processes. As sensitive data are not leaving the institutions’ network boundaries, the patient data underlie a higher level of protection than in the currently employed (centralized) systems. Furthermore, due to reduced legal barriers, the proposed decentralized system might be simpler to implement in a transnational, intereuropean setting with mixed (national) data protecion laws.https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01994-4Kidney-exchangePrivacySecure multi-party computation (MPC) |
spellingShingle | Timm Birka Kay Hamacher Tobias Kussel Helen Möllering Thomas Schneider SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making Kidney-exchange Privacy Secure multi-party computation (MPC) |
title | SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem |
title_full | SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem |
title_fullStr | SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem |
title_full_unstemmed | SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem |
title_short | SPIKE: secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem |
title_sort | spike secure and private investigation of the kidney exchange problem |
topic | Kidney-exchange Privacy Secure multi-party computation (MPC) |
url | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01994-4 |
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