Privacy-Preserving Prediction of Postoperative Mortality in Multi-Institutional Data: Development and Usability Study

Background To circumvent regulatory barriers that limit medical data exchange due to personal information security concerns, we use homomorphic encryption (HE) technology, enabling computation on encrypted data and enhancing privacy. Objective This study explores whether using HE to integrate encrypted multi-institutional data enhances predictive power in research, focusing on the integration feasibility across institutions and determining the optimal size of hospital data sets for improved prediction models. Methods We used data from 341,007 individuals aged 18 years and older who underwent noncardiac surgeries across 3 medical institutions. The study focused on predicting in-hospital mortality within 30 days postoperatively, using secure logistic regression based on HE as the prediction model. We compared the predictive performance of this model using plaintext data from a single institution against a model using encrypted data from multiple institutions. Results The predictive model using encrypted data from all 3 institutions exhibited the best performance based on area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (0.941); the model combining Asan Medical Center (AMC) and Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) data exhibited the best predictive performance based on area under the precision-recall curve (0.132). Both Ewha Womans University Medical Center and SNUH demonstrated improvement in predictive power for their own institutions upon their respective data’s addition to the AMC data. Conclusions Prediction models using multi-institutional data sets processed with HE outperformed those using single-institution data sets, especially when our model adaptation approach was applied, which was further validated on a smaller host hospital with a limited data set.