Blockchain-enabled immutable, distributed, and highly available clinical research activity logging system for...

Area of Science:

• Distributed systems
• Blockchain technology
• Data analysis

Background:

• Federated data analysis across multiple institutions presents challenges in data security, immutability, and availability.
• Existing systems often lack transparency and efficiency in managing research communication and data logs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a distributed, immutable, and highly available cross-cloud blockchain system for federated data analysis.
• To facilitate secure and transparent data sharing and analysis activities among multiple institutions.

Main Methods:

• Processed 9166 COVID-19 related data logs from the R2D2 Consortium GitHub repository.
• Developed on-chain and off-chain components for storing and querying activity logs on a blockchain.
• Measured smart contract deployment, transaction times, and log recording/querying efficiency against a centralized baseline.

Main Results:

• Smart contract deployment averaged 4.5 seconds.
• Activity log recording on the blockchain took just over 2 seconds, compared to 5-9 seconds for the baseline.
• Blockchain querying averaged less than 0.4 seconds, significantly faster than the baseline's 2.1 seconds.

Conclusions:

• The developed cross-cloud, blockchain-based system is feasible for federated data analysis, demonstrating low deployment, recording, and querying times.
• Further evaluation is needed for larger networks, activity surge accommodation, and query time optimization as the blockchain scales.