ClustChain: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Efficient Genomic Data Storage Using Attribute-Based Clustering

Abstract

Genomic data has become an essential component of modern healthcare, driving innovations leading to more precise personalized care. While the exponential growth of genomic data opens significant opportunities for personalized healthcare, it has introduced several challenges related to genomic data.  Among these, data storage and data retrieval remain the major concerns due to the large size of genomic data, while issues related to data integrity, data privacy and data security complicate the situation further.  To address these challenges, blockchain technology has been explored as a viable solution to provide tamperproof, secure, and trustworthy data management solution. This paper proposes an on-chain storage model for genomic data management on blockchain platform. The proposed solution aims to reduce storage requirement through an attribute-based clustering mechanism in combination with a data compression method applied to genomic data. At the same time, it focuses on reducing stream data retrieval time through a query-aware data organisation in a data stream. Multichain platform and python 3 have been used to perform the experiment. The results indicate an average reduction in storage requirement of 18% for 10k reads, 20% for 100k reads, and 22% for 1000k reads in a BAM file. However, the reduction can be even more depending upon the cluster to which the BAM reads are mapped. Additionally, there is an improvement in stream load time due to reduced storage requirements on data streams and supports both simple and complex queries.  It offers a memory-efficient data management solution for genomic data.