DICOM Images Are a Data Gold Mine
An OmniIndex Healthcare Case Study: Secure Data Insights From DICOM Images
By using OmniIndex, users can generate secure insights from new data sources. This case study looks at one in particular: highly sensitive and regulated DICOM images.
DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. These images contain many different types of data including device usage and patient administration information. They are commonly used in Healthcare and Life Science and yet the information is underutilized. This is because of the confidentiality and privacy requirements of much of this data.
OmniIndex solves this problem and enables this valuable new pool of data to be securely added to analytics and the workflow thanks to our patented FHE which enables computations to be performed on encrypted data, and our ability to encrypt and work with both structured and unstructured data in real-time.
One example of potential insights from DICOM images is device utilization. This is valuable because medical imaging equipment is a crucial and expensive part of Healthcare. Indeed, a report by the National Library of Medicine states:
“It is vital to accurately acquire the information about the use of existing large medical equipment in hospitals and scientifically analyze, develop, and mine the actual use, application trend, and potential of existing equipment based on existing HIS data.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7361865/
As said, however, DICOM image data is not commonly being used to produce these insights because the data is unavailable to analytics.
OmniIndex solves this challenge by letting you easily export the encrypted DICOM Image data from your OmniIndex data store (FHE Blockchain) into your analytics tool of choice to generate these insights. For example you could conduct real-time queries into what scans have been performed by which machines and when. From this, it would then be possible to gain insights revealing any issues around usage and the workflow of the Healthcare practice and thus investigate where any delays are being caused.
What’s more, because the vulnerable and regulated data is encrypted at all times, companies are able to add this confidential content into their workflow and use it in their collaboration and productivity tools compliantly and without risk of exposure. For example with Dropblock, users can add fully encrypted and redacted data to Sheets, Google Looker or BigQuery to gain detailed and advanced insights in real-time.