On September 17, the Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit e.V. (APS) is calling on its members and all stakeholders in the healthcare sector to take action on World Patient Safety Day.
To mark the occasion, the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) would like to draw attention to its PrivateAIM (Privacy-preserving Analytics in Medicine) use case, which is dedicated to this topic.
The aim of the PrivateAIM project is to develop a federated platform for privacy-preserving machine learning and data analytics for the MII. To this end, customized AI methods, federation mechanisms and protection models are being developed to protect the identities and sensitive health information of patients. Private AIM follows the principle of ‘code to the data’. The health data remains in the protected environments of the university hospitals and only the analysis algorithms are exchanged. This decentralized analysis aims to gain valuable insights into health data while protecting the privacy of patients.
The project is led by Prof. Dr. Oliver Kohlbacher, University Hospital Tübingen, Prof. Dr. Fabian Prasser, BIH and Prof. Dr. Daniel Rückert, Klinikum rechts der Isar, TU Munich. The PrivateAIM project team answered five questions about their project for the MII editorial team:
1. What does PrivateAIM do and what is the motivation behind the project?
With the FLAME platform, PrivateAIM is developing a solution for evaluating medical data. The analyses come to the data instead of sending the data to the analyses. This allows large volumes of data to be processed efficiently and modern AI methods to be used, which improves research while guaranteeing a high level of data security.
2. are there already initial results?
An initial version of the platform has been completed and is now being tested in various test scenarios. This will be followed by commissioning and further development.
3. What are the current challenges?
A major challenge is installing the platform at the participating university hospitals. As the platform is decentralized, it has to be set up separately at each location. However, this effort is worthwhile due to the advantages that the platform offers.
4. how are patients actively involved in the project?
PrivateAIM is a technical project that primarily builds infrastructure for various medical applications. Nevertheless, we want to prepare the basics of the project in such a way that they are understandable to a broad public. To this end, we are planning to create explanatory materials that will be used for dialog with patients, their representatives and the authorities.
5. what are the future plans for the FLAME platform?
Our main goal is to provide comprehensive support for medical research at university hospitals in the future. However, we also hope that other institutions and networks will take up our platform to enable even more research.
