A systematic review of privacy-preserving methods deployed with blockchain and federated learning for the telemedicine

Abstract

The unexpected and rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the acceptance of remote healthcare systems such as telemedicine. Telemedicine effectively provides remote communication, better treatment recommendation, and personalized treatment on demand. It has emerged as the possible future of medicine. From a privacy perspective, secure storage, preservation, and controlled access to health data with consent are the main challenges to the effective deployment of telemedicine. It is paramount to fully overcome these challenges to integrate the telemedicine system into healthcare. In this regard, emerging technologies such as blockchain and federated learning have enormous potential to strengthen the telemedicine system. These technologies help enhance the overall healthcare standard when applied in an integrated way. The primary aim of this study is to perform a systematic literature review of previous research on privacy-preserving methods deployed with blockchain and federated learning for telemedicine. This study provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of relevant studies based on the architecture, privacy mechanisms, and machine learning methods used for data storage, access, and analytics. The survey allows the integration of blockchain and federated learning technologies with suitable privacy techniques to design a secure, trustworthy, and accurate telemedicine model with a privacy guarantee.

Keywords: Blockchain; Federated learning; Healthcare; Privacy-preserving methods; Telemedicine.

Fig. 1

Benefits of integrating blockchain with federated learning for different usecases.

Fig. 2

Thematic structure of paper.

Fig. 3

Architecture of cloud-based telemedicine system.

Fig. 4

Challenges in telemedicine system.

Fig. 5

Privacy-preserving mechanisms deployed on blockchain.

Fig. 6

Architecture of federated learning in healthcare scenario.

Fig. 7

The proposed telemedicine architecture integrating blockchain and federated learning. The remote hospitals can access the patient clinical data and global model updates via blockchain.