Truly privacy-preserving federated analytics for precision medicine with multiparty homomorphic encryption

David Froelicher, Juan R. Troncoso-Pastoriza, Jean Louis Raisaro, Michel A. Cuendet, Joao Sa Sousa, Hyunghoon Cho, Bonnie Berger, Jacques Fellay and Jean-Pierre Hubaux ()
Additional contact information
David Froelicher: EPFL
Juan R. Troncoso-Pastoriza: EPFL
Jean Louis Raisaro: Lausanne University Hospital
Michel A. Cuendet: Lausanne University Hospital
Joao Sa Sousa: EPFL
Hyunghoon Cho: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Bonnie Berger: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Jacques Fellay: Lausanne University Hospital
Jean-Pierre Hubaux: EPFL

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Using real-world evidence in biomedical research, an indispensable complement to clinical trials, requires access to large quantities of patient data that are typically held separately by multiple healthcare institutions. We propose FAMHE, a novel federated analytics system that, based on multiparty homomorphic encryption (MHE), enables privacy-preserving analyses of distributed datasets by yielding highly accurate results without revealing any intermediate data. We demonstrate the applicability of FAMHE to essential biomedical analysis tasks, including Kaplan-Meier survival analysis in oncology and genome-wide association studies in medical genetics. Using our system, we accurately and efficiently reproduce two published centralized studies in a federated setting, enabling biomedical insights that are not possible from individual institutions alone. Our work represents a necessary key step towards overcoming the privacy hurdle in enabling multi-centric scientific collaborations.

Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25972-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-25972-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25972-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().