An approach to share MRI data over the Cloud preserving patients' privacy

Patients' data security and privacy is fundamental in the perspective of moving clinical data over the Cloud. Indeed, this concern has slowed down the adoption of Cloud services in the healthcare context. In fact, clinical operators are reluctant to open Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to external Cloud services. In this paper, we discuss system developed at the IRCCS “Bonino Pulejo” clinical and research centre (Italy) that is able to solve this concern. Such a system is based on two software components that are anonymizer and splitter. The first collects anonymize clinical data, whereas the second obfuscates and stores data in multiple Cloud storage providers. Thus, only authorized clinical operators can access data over the Cloud. A case of study considering real Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data is analysed in order to assess the performance of the whole system.