Study: New method of privacy enhancement for AI-powered medical data

Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve doctors' ability to diagnose and treat sleep apnea. But the technology is not widely adopted due to fears that it does not safeguard patient data.

This could soon change.

A new University at Buffalo-led study shows how to safely encrypt AI-powered data as it travels from third-party cloud service providers, like Google or Amazon, to doctors and their patients.

The method, which relies on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), proved 99.56% effective in detecting sleep apnea from a deidentified electrocardiogram (ECG) dataset that is available for research. Ultimately, the technique could speed up and improve the detection and treatment of sleep apnea, and be used in other health care applications where securing data is paramount.

"This work highlights how secure, encrypted data-processing can protect patient privacy while still enabling advanced, AI-based diagnostic tools. It offers significant potential for improving health care security in ...