A State Channel Based Approach to Address Scalability of Healthcare Data Sharing

The process of exchanging healthcare data introduces stringent requirements regarding users’ privacy. Federated learning (FL) is a novel model-sharing technique that aims to give additional privacy guarantees during machine learning process. Blockchain, as a form of distributed ledger technology, possesses the characteristic of trustworthiness; however, it is deficient in terms of computational capacity with a high-latency network due to its laborious consensus protocols. In this paper we present a distributed healthcare FL-based secure model sharing architecture to ensure healthcare data privacy and scalability. The solution relies on state channels technique to reduce on-chain transactions, contrast architecture latency, and reduce bandwidth consumption, alleviating the burden on the blockchain. State channels can be utilized to efficiently execute the tasks of federated learning models sharing and to solve the scalability problem.