A Systematic Review of the Use of Blockchain in Healthcare

Blockchain technology enables a decentralized and distributed environment with no need for a central authority. Transactions are simultaneously secure and trustworthy due to the use of cryptographic principles. In recent years, blockchain technology has become very trendy and penetrated different domains, mostly due to the popularity of cryptocurrencies. One field where blockchain technology has tremendous potential is healthcare, due to the need for a more patient-centric approach to healthcare systems and to connect disparate systems and increase the accuracy of electronic healthcare records (EHRs). In this systematic review, an analysis of state-of-the-art blockchain research in the field of healthcare is conducted. The aim is to reveal the potential applications of the technology and to highlight the challenges and possible directions of blockchain research in healthcare. First, background information is discussed, followed by a description of the exact methodology used in this paper. Next, an analysis of the results is given, which includes a bibliometric overview, an analysis of gathered data and its properties, and the results of a literature quality assessment. Lastly, there is a discussion of the results from the analysis. The findings indicate that blockchain technology research in healthcare is increasing and it is mostly used for data sharing, managing health records and access control. Other scenarios are very rare. Most research is aimed at presenting novel structural designs in the form of frameworks, architectures or models. Findings also show that technical details about the used blockchain elements are not given in most of the analyzed publications and that most research does not present any prototype implementation or implementation details. Often even with a prototype implementation, no details about blockchain elements are given.

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A Systematic Review of the Use of Blockchain in Healthcare

Symmetry ◽

10.3390/sym10100470 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (10) ◽

pp. 470 ◽

Cited By ~ 82

Author(s):

Marko Hölbl ◽

Marko Kompara ◽

Aida Kamišalić ◽

Lili Nemec Zlatolas

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Background Information ◽

Technology Research ◽

Distributed Environment ◽

Health Records ◽

Prototype Implementation ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Technical Details

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Blockchain Personal Health Records: A Systematic Review (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.25094 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Hao Sen Andrew Fang ◽

Teng Hwee Tan ◽

Yan Fang Cheryl Tan ◽

Marcus Tan

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

Grey Literature ◽

Data Access ◽

Personal Health Records ◽

Personal Health ◽

Health Records ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Data Access Control ◽

Collection Form ◽

Permissioned Blockchains

BACKGROUND Blockchain technology has the potential to enable more secure, transparent and equitable data management. In the healthcare domain, it has been most frequently applied to electronic health records (EHRs). Apart from securely managing data, blockchain also has a significant advantage of distributing data access, control and ownership to the end-users. This attribute, among others, makes it especially appealing when used to power personal health records (PHRs). OBJECTIVE In this review, we aim to examine the current landscape, design choices and limitations of blockchain-based PHRs. METHODS Adopting the PRISMA guidelines, a cross-discipline systematic review was performed in July 2020 on all eligible articles, including grey literature, from the following eight databases: ACM, IEEE Xplore, MEDLINE, ScienceDirect, Scopus, SpringerLink, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Three reviewers independently performed a full-text review and data abstraction using a standardized data collection form. RESULTS 58 articles fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The review found that the blockchain PHR space has been maturing over the past five years, from purely conceptual ideas initially to an increasing trend of publications describing prototypes and even implementations. Although the eventual PHR application is purposed for the healthcare industry, majority of the articles came from Engineering or Computer Science publications. Among the blockchain PHRs described, permissioned blockchains and off-chain storage were the more common design choices. While eighteen articles described a tethered blockchain PHR, all of these were at the conceptual stage. CONCLUSIONS This review revealed that research interest in using blockchain for PHRs is increasing and that the space is maturing. With further experimentation, this trend will very likely lead to breakthroughs to address existing limitations which could ultimately accelerate the adoption of blockchain PHRs.

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The Application of Blockchain in Supply Chain Industry

Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT) ◽

10.17762/turcomat.v12i3.936 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 1400-1408

Author(s):

Leo Willyanto Santoso Et.al

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Case Studies ◽

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

Technological Revolution ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Potential Applications

This research focuses on analyzing the state of the art of the blockchain technology and in publicizing the potential applications and implementations that the blockchain can deliver to the supply chain. For this, it will be explained in a simple way technology and its operation in the supply chain and case studies of real companies that are currently betting on this technological revolution, capable of improving the efficiency of any process logistic.

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Blockchain Technology-based Supply Chain: State-of-the-art and Future Prospects

International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering - Special Issue ◽

10.35940/ijitee.c8384.0110321 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 125-136

Author(s):

Youness Tribis ◽

Abdelali El Bouchti ◽

Houssine Bouayad

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

Supply Chain ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Research Topic ◽

Third Party ◽

Future Research ◽

Future Prospects ◽

Scientific Databases ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Literature Reviews

Initially developed for Bitcoin cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology (BCT) is a decentralized transaction managing technology that provides security, anonymity and data integrity in transactions without the need of any trusted third party. The interest in BCT has been grown, as research topic for many fields, such as finance, health, government, agriculture and many particular Supply Chain (SC) industries. However, there is a lack of systematic literature reviews (SLR) on existing research concerning how BCT is well relevant in SC. This paper conducts a systematic review in order to examine all pertinent research on SC based on BCT. The main inspiration for this work was to synthesize existing evidence, classify research tendencies available in the literature, and identify open themes and gaps for development in this discipline. However, 45 primary papers have been extracted from scientific databases. This systematic review provides direction for future research regarding the applications of BCT for SC

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Proteomics of Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors: A Systematic Review

Protein and Peptide Letters ◽

10.2174/0929866527666200504122116 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 27 (12) ◽

pp. 1276-1287

Author(s):

Brigida Anna Maiorano ◽

Giovanni Schinzari ◽

Sabrina Chiloiro ◽

Felicia Visconti ◽

Domenico Milardi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

Neuroendocrine Tumors ◽

Prognostic Markers ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Therapeutic Targets ◽

The State ◽

Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors ◽

Rare Tumors ◽

Personalized Approach ◽

Future Management

Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PanNETs) are rare tumors having usually an indolent behavior, but sometimes with unpredictable aggressiveness. PanNETs are more often non-functioning (NF), unable to produce functioning hormones, while 10-30% present as functioning (F) - PanNETs, such as insulinomas , gastrinomas , and other rare tumors. Diagnostic and prognostic markers, but also new therapeutic targets, are still lacking. Proteomics techniques represent therefore promising approaches for the future management of PanNETs. We conducted a systematic review to summarize the state of the art of proteomics in PanNETs. A total of 9 studies were included, focusing both on NF- and F-PanNETs. Indeed, proteomics is useful for the diagnosis, the prognosis and the detection of therapeutic targets. However, further studies are required. It is also warranted to standardize the analysis methods and the collection techniques, in order to validate proteins with a relevance in the personalized approach to PanNETs management.

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MedShard: Electronic Health Record Sharing Using Blockchain Sharding

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13115889 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (11) ◽

pp. 5889

Author(s):

Faiza Hashim ◽

Khaled Shuaib ◽

Farag Sallabi

Keyword(s):

Healthcare System ◽

Small Groups ◽

Network Performance ◽

Communication Overhead ◽

Privacy And Security ◽

Health Records ◽

Medical Practitioners ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Simulation Results ◽

Electronic Health

Electronic health records (EHRs) are important assets of the healthcare system and should be shared among medical practitioners to improve the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis. Blockchain technology has been investigated and adopted in healthcare as a solution for EHR sharing while preserving privacy and security. Blockchain can revolutionize the healthcare system by providing a decentralized, distributed, immutable, and secure architecture. However, scalability has always been a bottleneck in blockchain networks due to the consensus mechanism and ledger replication to all network participants. Sharding helps address this issue by artificially partitioning the network into small groups termed shards and processing transactions parallelly while running consensus within each shard with a subset of blockchain nodes. Although this technique helps resolve issues related to scalability, cross-shard communication overhead can degrade network performance. This study proposes a transaction-based sharding technique wherein shards are formed on the basis of a patient’s previously visited health entities. Simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms standard-based healthcare blockchain techniques in terms of the number of appointments processed, consensus latency, and throughput. The proposed technique eliminates cross-shard communication by forming complete shards based on “the need to participate” nodes per patient.

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In vivo interactome profiling by enzyme‐catalyzed proximity labeling

Cell & Bioscience ◽

10.1186/s13578-021-00542-3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Yangfan Xu ◽

Xianqun Fan ◽

Yang Hu

Keyword(s):

State Of The Art ◽

Catalytic Efficiency ◽

Biological Processes ◽

Protein Protein Interaction ◽

Current State ◽

Protein Interactome ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Protein Protein Interaction Networks ◽

Temporal And Spatial

AbstractEnzyme-catalyzed proximity labeling (PL) combined with mass spectrometry (MS) has emerged as a revolutionary approach to reveal the protein-protein interaction networks, dissect complex biological processes, and characterize the subcellular proteome in a more physiological setting than before. The enzymatic tags are being upgraded to improve temporal and spatial resolution and obtain faster catalytic dynamics and higher catalytic efficiency. In vivo application of PL integrated with other state of the art techniques has recently been adapted in live animals and plants, allowing questions to be addressed that were previously inaccessible. It is timely to summarize the current state of PL-dependent interactome studies and their potential applications. We will focus on in vivo uses of newer versions of PL and highlight critical considerations for successful in vivo PL experiments that will provide novel insights into the protein interactome in the context of human diseases.

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Towards Interconnected Blockchains

ACM Computing Surveys ◽

10.1145/3460287 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 54 (7) ◽

pp. 1-39

Author(s):

Ankur Lohachab ◽

Saurabh Garg ◽

Byeong Kang ◽

Muhammad Bilal Amin ◽

Junmin Lee ◽

...

Keyword(s):

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

Future Research ◽

Missing Link ◽

Layered Architecture ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Wide Scale ◽

Effective Development ◽

Insight Into ◽

Game Changer

Unprecedented attention towards blockchain technology is serving as a game-changer in fostering the development of blockchain-enabled distinctive frameworks. However, fragmentation unleashed by its underlying concepts hinders different stakeholders from effectively utilizing blockchain-supported services, resulting in the obstruction of its wide-scale adoption. To explore synergies among the isolated frameworks requires comprehensively studying inter-blockchain communication approaches. These approaches broadly come under the umbrella of Blockchain Interoperability (BI) notion, as it can facilitate a novel paradigm of an integrated blockchain ecosystem that connects state-of-the-art disparate blockchains. Currently, there is a lack of studies that comprehensively review BI, which works as a stumbling block in its development. Therefore, this article aims to articulate potential of BI by reviewing it from diverse perspectives. Beginning with a glance of blockchain architecture fundamentals, this article discusses its associated platforms, taxonomy, and consensus mechanisms. Subsequently, it argues about BI’s requirement by exemplifying its potential opportunities and application areas. Concerning BI, an architecture seems to be a missing link. Hence, this article introduces a layered architecture for the effective development of protocols and methods for interoperable blockchains. Furthermore, this article proposes an in-depth BI research taxonomy and provides an insight into the state-of-the-art projects. Finally, it determines possible open challenges and future research in the domain.

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Blockchain Applications in Agribusiness: A Systematic Review

Future Internet ◽

10.3390/fi13040095 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 95

Author(s):

Geneci da Silva Ribeiro Rocha ◽

Letícia de Oliveira ◽

Edson Talamini

Keyword(s):

Complex System ◽

Systematic Review ◽

Web Of Science ◽

Scientific Literature ◽

Early Stage ◽

Technological Development ◽

Economic Sectors ◽

Future Studies ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Near Future

Blockchain is a technology that can be applied in different sectors to solve various problems. As a complex system, agribusiness presents many possibilities to take advantage of blockchain technology. The main goal of this paper is to identify the purposes for which blockchain has been applied in the agribusiness sector, for which a PRISMA-based systematic review was carried out. The scientific literature corpus was accessed and selected from Elsevier’s Scopus and ISI of Knowledge’s Web of Science (WoS) platforms, using the PRISMA protocol procedures. Seventy-one articles were selected for analysis. Blockchain application in agribusiness is a novel topic, with the first publication dating from 2016. The technological development prevails more than blockchain applications since it has been addressed mainly in the Computer Sciences and Engineering. Blockchain applications for agribusiness management of financial, energy, logistical, environmental, agricultural, livestock, and industrial purposes have been reported in the literature. The findings suggest that blockchain brings many benefits when used in agribusiness supply chains. We concluded that the research on blockchain applications in agribusiness is only at an early stage, as many prototypes are being developed and tested in the laboratory. In the near future, blockchain will be increasingly applied across all economic sectors, including agribusiness, promoting greater reliability and agility in information with a reduced cost. Several gaps for future studies were observed, with significant value for science, industry, and society.

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Efficient Graph Collaborative Filtering via Contrastive Learning

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21144666 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (14) ◽

pp. 4666

Author(s):

Zhiqiang Pan ◽

Honghui Chen

Keyword(s):

Collaborative Filtering ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Representation Learning ◽

First Order ◽

Satisfactory Performance ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Benchmark Datasets ◽

Bayesian Personalized Ranking ◽

Graph Neural Networks ◽

Training Efficiency

Collaborative filtering (CF) aims to make recommendations for users by detecting user’s preference from the historical user–item interactions. Existing graph neural networks (GNN) based methods achieve satisfactory performance by exploiting the high-order connectivity between users and items, however they suffer from the poor training efficiency problem and easily introduce bias for information propagation. Moreover, the widely applied Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR) loss is insufficient to provide supervision signals for training due to the extremely sparse observed interactions. To deal with the above issues, we propose the Efficient Graph Collaborative Filtering (EGCF) method. Specifically, EGCF adopts merely one-layer graph convolution to model the collaborative signal for users and items from the first-order neighbors in the user–item interactions. Moreover, we introduce contrastive learning to enhance the representation learning of users and items by deriving the self-supervisions, which is jointly trained with the supervised learning. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, i.e., Yelp2018 and Amazon-book, and the experimental results demonstrate that EGCF can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in terms of Recall and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG), especially on ranking the target items at right positions. In addition, EGCF shows obvious advantages in the training efficiency compared with the competitive baselines, making it practicable for potential applications.

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