Cloud-based Biomedical and Health Research Collaborations: A review of applications and their data sharing approaches (Preprint)

Abstract

The benefits of clouds to biomedical and health researchers especially consortia are tremendous spanning sequencing of instruments for health monitoring, image collection and archival, and analyses among others. The cloud enables On-demand access to researcher resources so that researchers can automatically consume them with minimal management effort. However, its wide adoption is staggeringly slow despite all these benefits due to a variety of challenges related to the availability and reliability of researcher applications, interoperability, ownership, security and privacy, and non-compliance to existing research regulations and laws.

The main goal of this paper is to survey and map literature objectively to learn and discern what actually happens when biomedical and health research consortia activities and data are migrated onto the cloud.

We investigate through literature, the application of Cloud computing paradigm within biomedical and health research, using publications from journals and scientific databases.

Findings indicate (a) a variety of biomedical and health research applications that we categorize as tools, platforms and storage archives, used for storing, enabling robust access and sharing, querying, and analyzing biomedical and health research data; (b)the paradigm’s adoption is extensive to include assistive care for elderly and the chronic, real time ECG monitoring and analysis, data management, picture archiving, and telemedicine; (c) that researchers need guidance on when to shift their endeavors to the cloud; (d) most applications are specific and limited in regards to flexibility and usability, confidentiality preservation, ownership, likelihood for collusion; (e)Data sharing and security models used by these applications have varied limitations, and their implementation requires that privacy and compliance to existing data protection regulations are observed. While resource sharing may be pivotal to biomedical consortia, utilizing the cloud for collaboration as a service requires that the service provision and consumption is complaint to the SLAs and related data protection regulations. The service is hoped that it is of high availability, scalable, secure and privacy-aware, yet biomedical and health research applications hosted for research consortia activities don’t entirely meet similar requirements

Therefore, the biomedical and health research cloud is complex with varied requirements for security and privacy, availability, scalability and trust. An attempt is proposed, “The Collab”, as a secure and a privacy-aware biomedical and health research collaboration cloud application. The Collab ensures that data under collaboration is secure, and infrastructure too, is privacy-aware, avails efficient and effective data auditing, and extended control beyond consortia boundary using a proxy-re- encryption and a 2-factor authentication.

MUST/20/07-16