The stroke acute care case of ASCLEPIOS was presented to the researchers of the Biomedical Engineering and Physics Department of the Amsterdam UMC, in the virtual cardiovascular meeting “Secure cloud-based data sharing of medical records for acute care and research” that took place on 21st January 2021. The virtual presentation was attended by around 20 researchers with both clinical and technical background, with interest in cardiovascular diseases and in particular stroke.
The presentation offered an introduction to data security and modern data protection schemes used in ASCLEPIOS, including contextual Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) and Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE).
Then the participants had the opportunity to learn more details about the stroke acute care cases and how they were implemented using the ASCLEPIOS framework. Afterwards, the presenters highlighted the case of data re-use for research purposes, and in particular the aspects of access control in anonymised research datasets and privacy preservation with the use of Functional Encryption.
Figure 1: Data sharing framework for research purposes
After the presentations, a questionnaire was circulated to measure – among others – the audience’s awareness of the featured cryptographic techniques. The results showed that most of the attendants had never heard about the modern data protection schemes that are currently under development in ASCLEPIOS (indicative results shown in Figure 2).
Figure 2: Indicative survey results – Awareness of modern cryptographic and access control techniques
This illustrates the importance of regularly organising such events and performing relevant presentations to disseminate novel encryption and data protection techniques, in order to increase their acceptance by the potential users in the field of medical research.