Efficient Medical Image Data Management Based on a Lightweight Sharding Blockchain

Medical images play an important role in clinical diagnosis. However, the management of medical images has fallen into the dilemma of information islands. Blockchain technology is proposed to solve the problem of medical images’ information islands due to its decentralization, transparency, openness, autonomy, anonymity, and information tampering. However, each node needs to maintain the complete blockchain, and with the amount of medical image data rapidly increasing, the performance limitations of blockchain are emerging, such as poor performance in effectively querying and storing medical image data. Sharding technology is proposed to address the above limitations. In this paper, we propose an efficient management architecture based on a lightweight sharding blockchain for medical image management (EASBM). Our architecture consists of four layers: sharding blockchain layer, distributed storage layer, cache layer, and application layer. The sharding blockchain layer splits each block into head and body and divides each participant into corresponding shards, implementing a lightweight blockchain framework. The distributed storage layer saves the raw data and hash values of medical images, reducing the storage burden of blockchain and implementing off-chain storage. Our empirical evaluations suggest that the time spent querying a record is less than 4 ms in our proposed architecture, which contains a network of 1024 participating nodes.