Author:
Birka Timm,Hamacher Kay,Kussel Tobias,Möllering Helen,Schneider Thomas
Abstract
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.
Funder
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts
HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Health Informatics,Health Policy,Computer Science Applications