  In recent years, many researchers have focused on developing a feasible
solution for storing and exchanging medical images in the field of health care.
Current practices are deployed on cloud-based centralized data centers, which
increase maintenance costs, require massive storage space, and raise privacy
concerns about sharing information over a network. Therefore, it is important
to design a framework to enable sharing and storing of big medical data
efficiently within a trustless environment. In the present paper, we propose a
novel proof-of-concept design for a distributed patient-centric image
management (PCIM) system that is aimed to ensure safety and control of patient
private data without using a centralized infrastructure. In this system, we
employed an emerging Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system
technology called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Then, we implemented an
Ethereum smart contract called the patientcentric access control protocol to
enable a distributed and trustworthy access control policy. IPFS provides the
means for decentralized storage of medical images with global accessibility. We
describe how the PCIM system architecture facilitates the distributed and
secured patient-centric data access across multiple entities such as hospitals,
patients, and image requestors. Finally, we deployed a smart contract prototype
on an Ethereum testnet blockchain and evaluated the proposed framework within
the Windows environment. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed
scheme is efficient and feasible.
