A Differential Privacy Protection Query Language for Medical Data: Study Design (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Medical data mining and sharing is an important process to realize the value of medical big data in E-Health applications. However, medical data contains a large amount of personal private information of patients, there is a risk of privacy disclosure when sharing and mining. Therefore, how to ensure the security of medical big data in the process of publishing, sharing and mining has become the focus of current researches. OBJECTIVE The objective of our study is to design a framework based on differential privacy protection mechanism to ensure the security sharing of medical data. We developed a privacy Protection Query Language (PQL) that can integrate multiple machine mining methods and provide secure sharing functions for medical data. METHODS This paper adopts a modular design method with three sub-modules, including parsing module, mining module and noising module. Each module encapsulates different computing devices, such as composite parser, noise jammer, etc. In the PQL framework, we apply the differential privacy mechanism to the results of the module collaborative calculation to optimize the security of various mining algorithms. These computing devices operate independently, but the mining results depend on their cooperation. RESULTS Designed and developed a query language framework that provides medical data mining, sharing and privacy preserving functions. We theoretically proved the performance of the PQL framework. The experimental results showed that the PQL framework can ensure the security of each mining result, and the average usefulness of the output results is above 97%. CONCLUSIONS We presented a security framework that enables medical data providers to securely share the health data or treatment data, and developed a usable query language based on differential privacy mechanism that enables researchers to mine potential information securely using data mining algorithms. CLINICALTRIAL