A distributed decision support system involving multiple clinical centres is crucial to the diagnosis of rare diseases. Although sharing of valid diagnosed cases can facilitate later decision making, possibly from geographically different centres, the released information could reveal patient privacy if it is not properly protected. Clinical centres may have to impose their distinct regulations and rules that govern the use of their data externally. The collaboration of centres, therefore, must respect the collective policies and ideally, serve users the most appropriate and useful resources possible in the system according to the past experience. In this way, the system’s value is entrusted and even elevated through continuous collaboration. We present in this paper a link-anonymised data scheme and in addition to that, a security model that together enforce privacy data security and secure resource access for distributed clinical centres. Our illustration of the approach involves a prototype medical decision support system, HealthAgents, for brain tumour diagnosis.

In this paper, we describe the unique security issues involved in healthcare domains. These have been addressed to the needs of the HealthAgents project. In the proposed approach, several levels of security have been provided in accordance with Software Engineering principles, ethical regulations for healthcare data, as well as the security requirements usually raised from the distributed clinical settings. The result is the production of a secure and maintainable Multi-Agent System that enables secure communication, uniform home site authentication, and customised resource access authorisation. A security policy rule scheme has been designed for agent interaction modelling. This separates the functional and non-functional (security) requirements but let security policy constraints integrate into the running of the agents via a unified role notion. Each user/agent can play a function role only when its assigned social rights roles permit the access to resources of various types and geographical locations, as specified in the function role behaviour. The approach is illustrated using a comprehensive secure access case.

This paper focuses on the problem of representing, in a meaningful way, the knowledge involved in the HealthAgents project. Our work is motivated by the complexity of representing electronic healthcare records in a consistent manner. We present HADOM (HealthAgents domain ontology) which conceptualises the required HealthAgents information and propose describing the sources knowledge by the means of conceptual graphs (CGs). This allows to build upon the existing ontology permitting for modularity and flexibility. The novelty of our approach lies in the ease with which CGs can be placed above other formalisms and their potential for optimised querying and retrieval.