Privacy-Preserving Integration of Medical Data : A Practical Multiparty Private Set Intersection

J Med Syst. 2017 Mar;41(3):37. doi: 10.1007/s10916-016-0657-4. Epub 2017 Jan 16.

Abstract

Medical data are often maintained by different organizations. However, detailed analyses sometimes require these datasets to be integrated without violating patient or commercial privacy. Multiparty Private Set Intersection (MPSI), which is an important privacy-preserving protocol, computes an intersection of multiple private datasets. This approach ensures that only designated parties can identify the intersection. In this paper, we propose a practical MPSI that satisfies the following requirements: The size of the datasets maintained by the different parties is independent of the others, and the computational complexity of the dataset held by each party is independent of the number of parties. Our MPSI is based on the use of an outsourcing provider, who has no knowledge of the data inputs or outputs. This reduces the computational complexity. The performance of the proposed MPSI is evaluated by implementing a prototype on a virtual private network to enable parallel computation in multiple threads. Our protocol is confirmed to be more efficient than comparable existing approaches.

Keywords: Medical data; Privacy-preserving data integration; Private set intersection.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Security / instrumentation*
  • Confidentiality*
  • Health Information Management / instrumentation*
  • Humans