The Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) is a platform providing federated analytics for diagnosis and research in clinical neuroscience research. The federated analytics is possible thanks to a distributed engine that executes computations and transfers information between the members of the federation (hospital nodes). In this talk the speaker will describe the process of designing and implementing new analytical tools, i.e. statistical and machine learning algorithms.  Mr. Sakellariou will further describe the environment in which these federated algorithms run, the challenges and the available tools, the principles that guide its design and the followed general methodology for each new algorithm. One of the most important challenges which are faced is to design these tools in a way that does not compromise the privacy of the clinical data involved. The speaker will show how to address the main questions when designing such algorithms: how to decompose and distribute the computations and what kind of information to exchange between nodes, in order to comply with the privacy constraint mentioned above. Finally, also the subject of validating these federated algorithms will be briefly touched.

The Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) Dementia had been installed in several memory clinics across Europe allowing them to federate their real-world databases. Research open access databases had also been integrated such as ADNI (Alzheimer’s Dementia Neuroimaging Initiative), reaching a cumulative case load of more than 5,000 patients (major cognitive disorder due to Alzheimer’s disease, other major cognitive disorder, minor cognitive disorder, controls). The statistic and machine learning tools implemented in the MIP allowed researchers to conduct easily federated analyses among Italian memory clinics (Redolfi et al. 2020) and also across borders between the French (Lille), the Swiss (Lausanne) and the Italian (Brescia) datasets.

This talks presents ethics requirements of the Medical Informatics Platform, a data sharing platform for medical data using data federation mechanisms. The talk presents how the Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) works and which ethical requirements need to be considered when working with federated data.

This lecture discusses risk-based anonymization approaches for medical research.