Could Blockchain Technology Empower Patients, Improve Education, and Boost Research in Radiology Departments? An Open Question for Future Applications

Dentistry in the Digital Age: Embracing Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology can revolutionize the dental industry by offering secure and efficient data management and patient care solutions. This editorial explores how blockchain can benefit dentistry, including enhancing data security and privacy, streamlining interoperability, facilitating supply chain management, and empowering patients. Blockchain ensures tamper-proof and authorized access to patient data, enabling dentists and patients to have peace of mind regarding data security. Interoperability between dental systems can be improved through blockchain, allowing seamless data exchange and care coordination. By leveraging the transparency and immutability of blockchain, supply chain management in dentistry can be enhanced to ensure the authenticity of dental products. Moreover, blockchain empowers patients by granting them control over their healthcare data, promoting transparency and trust in the dental industry. However, challenges such as scalability, energy consumption, regulatory compliance, and data governance need to be addressed for successful implementation. Collaboration among stakeholders, education, and the development of regulatory frameworks are crucial for maximizing the benefits of blockchain technology in dentistry. By embracing blockchain, the dental industry can create a future where patient care is secure, efficient, and patient-centric.

Blockchain in radiology research and clinical practice: current trends and future directions

Blockchain usage in healthcare, in radiology, in particular, is at its very early infancy. Only a few research applications have been tested, however, blockchain technology is widely known outside healthcare and widely adopted, especially in Finance, since 2009 at least. Learning by history, radiology is a potential ideal scenario to apply this technology. Blockchain could have the potential to increase radiological data value in both clinical and research settings for the patient digital record, radiological reports, privacy control, quantitative image analysis, cybersecurity, radiomics and artificial intelligence.

Up-to-date experiences using blockchain in radiology are still limited, but radiologists should be aware of the emergence of this technology and follow its next developments. We present here the potentials of some applications of blockchain in radiology.

Applications of Blockchain in the Medical Field: Narrative Review

Background

As a distributed technology, blockchain has attracted increasing attention from stakeholders in the medical industry. Although previous studies have analyzed blockchain applications from the perspectives of technology, business, or patient care, few studies have focused on actual use-case scenarios of blockchain in health care. In particular, the outbreak of COVID-19 has led to some new ideas for the application of blockchain in medical practice.

Objective

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of the current and projected uses of blockchain technology in health care, as well as directions for future research. In addition to the framework structure of blockchain and application scenarios, its integration with other emerging technologies in health care is discussed.

Methods

We searched databases such as PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus, IEEE, and Springer using a combination of terms related to blockchain and health care. Potentially relevant papers were then compared to determine their relevance and reviewed independently for inclusion. Through a literature review, we summarize the key medical scenarios using blockchain technology.

Results

We found a total of 1647 relevant studies, 60 of which were unique studies that were included in this review. These studies report a variety of uses for blockchain and their emphasis differs. According to the different technical characteristics and application scenarios of blockchain, we summarize some medical scenarios closely related to blockchain from the perspective of technical classification. Moreover, potential challenges are mentioned, including the confidentiality of privacy, the efficiency of the system, security issues, and regulatory policy.

Conclusions

Blockchain technology can improve health care services in a decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, and secure manner. With the development of this technology and its integration with other emerging technologies, blockchain has the potential to offer long-term benefits. Not only can it be a mechanism to secure electronic health records, but blockchain also provides a powerful tool that can empower users to control their own health data, enabling a foolproof health data history and establishing medical responsibility.

ESR white paper: blockchain and medical imaging

Blockchain can be thought of as a distributed database allowing tracing of the origin of data, and who has manipulated a given data set in the past. Medical applications of blockchain technology are emerging. Blockchain has many potential applications in medical imaging, typically making use of the tracking of radiological or clinical data. Clinical applications of blockchain technology include the documentation of the contribution of different "authors" including AI algorithms to multipart reports, the documentation of the use of AI algorithms towards the diagnosis, the possibility to enhance the accessibility of relevant information in electronic medical records, and a better control of users over their personal health records. Applications of blockchain in research include a better traceability of image data within clinical trials, a better traceability of the contributions of image and annotation data for the training of AI algorithms, thus enhancing privacy and fairness, and potentially make imaging data for AI available in larger quantities. Blockchain also allows for dynamic consenting and has the potential to empower patients and giving them a better control who has accessed their health data. There are also many potential applications of blockchain technology for administrative purposes, like keeping track of learning achievements or the surveillance of medical devices. This article gives a brief introduction in the basic technology and terminology of blockchain technology and concentrates on the potential applications of blockchain in medical imaging.

Current trends of artificial intelligence in cancer imaging

In this editorial, we discussed the current research status of artificial intelligence (AI) in Oncology, reviewing the basics of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques and their emerging applications on clinical and imaging cancer workflow. The growing amounts of available “big data” coupled to the increasing computational power have enabled the development of computer-based systems capable to perform advanced tasks in many areas of clinical care, especially in medical imaging. ML is a branch of data science that allows the creation of computer algorithms that can learn and make predictions without prior instructions. DL is a subgroup of artificial neural network algorithms configurated to automatically extract features and perform high-level tasks; convolutional neural networks are the most common DL models used in medical image analysis. AI methods have been proposed in many areas of oncology granting promising results in radiology-based clinical applications. In detail, we explored the emerging applications of AI in oncological risk assessment, lesion detection, characterization, staging, and therapy response. Critical issues such as the lack of reproducibility and generalizability need to be addressed to fully implement AI systems in clinical practice. Nevertheless, AI impact on cancer imaging has been driving the shift of oncology towards a precision diagnostics and personalized cancer treatment.