Fig. 1.

Overview of image sharing frameworks. (A) Centralized solution stores data in one location such that when this location gets attacked or is under maintenance, all sites can’t access the medical images. Multiple researchers, labeled R_X,Y, exist at each site X and are responsible for storing and loading the medical images. We omitted researcher icons in the rest of this figure to reduce redundancy. (B) Existing blockchain-based solutions mainly store hashed medical images or pointers to the images on-chain such that when any site becomes unavailable, other sites can still access one another. However, only the stored hashed images or pointer to the images, and not the images themselves, receive the blockchain benefits of availability, immutability, and provenance. (C) Our solution handles large images by splitting and merging images, high viewing latency by scaling images for a preview feature, and code inconsistency by using a smart contract to provide availability/immutability/provenance to the code.