Source: Nowaitech Public Account

    Recently, the third session of the "Biomedical Data Sharing and Security" series forum, co-hosted by the Sichuan Bioinformatics Society, the Sichuan Medical Association Medical Informatics Committee, the Disease System Genetics Research Institute of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, the Translational Informatics and Data Sharing Security Branch of the Chinese Bioinformatics Society, the Privacy Computing Alliance Medical Application Working Group, and Nowaitech, was held online. This event is also one of the training courses for the 2022 Privacy Protection Computing Competition.

    Dai Tao, a researcher and deputy secretary of the party committee at the National Health Commission's Statistical Information Center, was invited to deliver a keynote speech. Pan Yi, a professor and dean of the School of Computer Science and Control Engineering at Shenzhen University of Science and Technology (preparation), academician of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and academician of the National Academy of Engineering of Ukraine, Zhang Xin, deputy general manager of Volcano Engine and a computer doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, were invited to give special speeches. Professor and Executive Dean Shen Bairong from the Disease System Genetics Research Institute of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, and Professor Wang Shuang, founder and chairman of Nowaitech, jointly served as the hosts of this forum.

    Dai Tao's keynote speech focused on the development of the medical informatics discipline in China. He emphasized that medical informatics has become an essential part of modern medicine, driving the informatization, digitalization, and intelligence of the health and wellness sector. The "14th Five-Year National Health Plan" released earlier this year clearly proposed to accelerate the construction of health informatization and promote the interconnection and application of health informatization for all. The 34th collective study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee pointed out the need to accelerate the construction of a digital China and the development of the digital economy, implementing a big data strategy. From a top-level strategic perspective, digital China is continuously promoting the construction of a healthy China.

    Looking forward, Dai Tao said that we need to continue to deepen the integration of information technology in the field of medical health, promote the interconnection of the medical health industry's informatization, achieve a full life cycle and comprehensive data sources, accelerate the application of artificial intelligence technology in the medical field, actively promote the modernization of the health medical data governance system and capabilities, balance data opening and sharing with security and privacy protection through comprehensive measures, strengthen the research of basic theories and key core technologies of medical informatics, and cultivate compound talents for the construction of new medical sciences.

    In his special speech, Academician Pan Yi focused on "Metaverse Medicine and Data Privacy," introducing the basic concepts of the metaverse, its three stages, development history, supporting technologies, eight basic characteristics, five elements, and six features. He discussed the application of the metaverse in biomedical scenarios and the challenges in implementation, including medical training, surgical operations, electronic prescriptions, game therapy, digital drugs, disease diagnosis, virtual reality therapy, remote consultation, metaverse biological experiments, and more. Additionally, due to data privacy being a key issue in metaverse medicine, Academician Pan Yi also discussed issues and solutions regarding data privacy in metaverse medicine.

    Since 2021, "metaverse" has become a buzzword. As a new concept, different people have different understandings of the metaverse. With the continuous maturation of the metaverse, a basic consensus is being reached. From a technical perspective, the six core technologies supporting the metaverse include blockchain, interactive technology, electronic games, artificial intelligence AI, networking and computing, and the Internet of Things.

    Regarding the development trend of metaverse technology, Academician Pan Yi believes that the metaverse depicts an "assembly" of various technologies. If past technologies were fighting alone, each drawing their own technical blueprint, the metaverse introduces a "full technology panorama." The metaverse is the ultimate manifestation of the internet, that is, a complex of all IT technologies. Currently, we are moving towards the development of the metaverse and have initially achieved the integration of several technologies, such as existing robots that integrate AI, vision, IoT, and other IT technologies, but it is not yet an integrated body of all technologies.

    In his speech, Academician Pan Yi discussed the potential big data privacy risks, device privacy risks, and life privacy risks that may be encountered in the medical metaverse. The metaverse redefines and confirms the rights of medical data, which has high value, but medical data is retained in hospitals, and patients cannot utilize their medical data. Hospitals also need to protect patient privacy, preventing medical data from achieving maximum utility. In the future, medical NFTs can enable patients to control their medical data and sell it, not only providing medical compensation for patients but also promoting data interaction and accelerating scientific and technological progress.

    In addition, Academician Pan Yi also shared typical application cases of Nowaitech in the medical field through privacy computing technology, such as the world's first privacy-protected large-scale medical research network pSCANNER, the first set of privacy computing-based cross-provincial multi-center gene analysis systems in China, the world's first privacy-protected cross-national medical big data analysis system, the first case of children's rare disease gene privacy query network in China, and AI medical imaging deep analysis with privacy protection.

    Dr. Zhang Xin's special speech focused on the "Cloud-Native Biomedical Operating System." Currently, the digital development of the biomedical medical industry faces many challenges: multimodal, high-dimensional, cross-scale biomedical big data is diverse and increasingly complex, with thousands of computational statistical tools and machine intelligence analysis models; interpreting biomedical problems based on big data requires mastering various massive data, being familiar with dozens or even hundreds of analysis tools, configuring various computing and storage resources, and optimizing time-consuming computing processes; the computational complexity of data mining has increased significantly, beyond the scope of individual professional capabilities; the "data-intensive scientific research new paradigm" lacks core common technology support, and scientific research efficiency is low, etc.

    The biomedical big data operating system is a full-chain, one-stop solution to the above challenges. However, China's bioinformatics field heavily relies on foreign analysis tools, and data sovereignty issues have affected national security; at the same time, bioinformatics research has entered a new paradigm of data-intensive research, bringing new challenges such as non-unified standards, tools, data, and resources to practitioners.

    Dr. Zhang Xin said in his speech that the biomedical big data operating system "Bio2S" can provide bioinformatics researchers with an operable, executable, shareable, and publishable computing environment, helping biomedical research teams achieve simplified processes, accelerated analysis, traceable processes, and reproducible results. It serves as a stable and efficient "technical base" and "technical empowerment accelerator" for the development of biomedical data technology platforms and commercial ecosystems. In addition, Bio2S relies on ByteDance's best practices in privacy computing and federated learning technologies, achieving data usability without visibility and model movement without data movement, maximizing the value of biomedical data. Dr. Zhang Xin said that he hopes to build cross-domain, institutional, and regional collaboration through open-source code, open API interfaces, and global community operations, creating a global ecosystem and promoting the continuous growth of products and communities. In the future, we hope to build a bioinformatics operating system to serve data-intensive research in bioinformatics and downstream industrial development.

    Professor Shen Bairong said in his summary and review that the guests of this forum discussed the issue of biomedical data security sharing from different angles of points, lines, and surfaces. Secretary Dai Tao talked about the unity of biomedical data opening and sharing with privacy and security from a national macro level, which needs to be standardized from policies and regulations and also needs to be protected and implemented from a technical perspective, relying on the joint participation and collaborative promotion of all parties; Academician Pan Yi discussed the next frontier direction and key technologies from the perspective of the metaverse and proposed integrating advanced technology innovation and landing applications; Dr. Zhang Xin introduced the Bio2S product from the point of view, which helps to build a prosperous and trustworthy biomedical data commercial ecosystem by gradually constructing a "technical base" and "technical empowerment accelerator." Currently, biomedical data sharing security faces a complex environment and requires a high level of technical expertise. For advanced technology, it is necessary to inherit and develop, and it is also necessary to carry out organized research.

    Professor Shen Bairong said that the "Biomedical Data Sharing and Security" series forum is an annual event that will be held offline. It has been held for three sessions and has achieved good results, and it will continue to be held in the future. We hope that through the series of forums, we can guide everyone to continue to pay attention to topics such as privacy protection and data sharing-related technologies and models, legal and compliance issues of medical data, outstanding achievements and cases of biomedical data privacy protection and security sharing, and jointly promote the high-quality development of China's medical and health industry digitalization.