Energy Efficient and Secure Neural Network–based Disease Detection Framework for Mobile Healthcare Network

Adopting mobile healthcare network (MHN) services such as disease detection is fraught with concerns about the security and privacy of the entities involved and the resource restrictions at the Internet of Things (IoT) nodes. Hence, the essential requirements for disease detection services are to (i) produce accurate and fast disease detection without jeopardizing the privacy of health clouds and medical users and (ii) reduce the computational and transmission overhead (energy consumption) of the IoT devices while maintaining the privacy. For privacy preservation of widely used neural network– (NN) based disease detection, existing literature suggests either computationally heavy public key fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), or secure multiparty computation, with a large number of interactions. Hence, the existing privacy-preserving NN schemes are energy consuming and not suitable for resource-constrained IoT nodes in MHN. This work proposes a lightweight, fully homomorphic, symmetric key FHE scheme (SkFhe) to address the issues involved in implementing privacy-preserving NN. Based on SkFhe, widely used non-linear activation functions ReLU and Leaky ReLU are implemented over the encrypted domain. Furthermore, based on the proposed privacy-preserving linear transformation and non-linear activation functions, an energy-efficient, accurate, and privacy-preserving NN is proposed. The proposed scheme guarantees privacy preservation of the health cloud’s NN model and medical user’s data. The experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed solution dramatically reduces the overhead in communication and computation at the user side compared to the existing schemes. Moreover, the improved energy efficiency at the user is accomplished with reduced diagnosis time without sacrificing classification accuracy.