As medicine becomes more data-intensive, Medical Science DMZ eyed as secure solution
Like other sciences, medical research is generating increasingly large datasets as doctors track health trends, the spread of diseases, genetic causes of illness and the like. Effectively using this data for efforts ranging from stopping the spread of deadly viruses to creating precision medicine treatments for individuals will be greatly accelerated by the secure sharing of the data, while also protecting individual privacy.
In a paper published Friday, Oct. 6 by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, a group of researchers led by Sean Peisert of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) wrote that the Science DMZ architecture developed for moving large data sets quick and securely could be adapted to meet the needs of the medical research community.
“You can’t just take the medical data from one site and drop it straight in to another site because of the policy constraints on that data,” said Eli Dart, a network engineer at the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) who is a co-author of the paper. “But as members of a society, our health could benefit if the medical science community can become more productive in terms of accessing relevant data.”

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