Evaluation Level: Reproducible Computation

Evaluation Level: Verifiable and Reproducible Biomedical Computation

Evaluation, reproducibility, and transparency are foundational principles in biomedical research. They are indispensable for validating scientific findings, maintaining credibility, and ensuring compliance with ethical and regulatory standards (van Rossum et al., 2023; Mora et al., 2022).

However, enabling verifiable and reproducible evaluation in decentralized biomedical settings remains highly challenging. A robust solution must maintain both data confidentiality and computational transparency—a dual objective that existing systems struggle to achieve.

Illustrative Scenarios

• Decentralized Clinical Trial Auditing Regulatory bodies need independent validation of trial outcomes. However, traditional auditing methods often require access to sensitive patient records, posing privacy risks (Berger et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2021).

• Genomic Research Validation Ensuring reproducibility in genomic studies is essential, yet public disclosure of raw data can compromise individual privacy. Cryptographic validation mechanisms are needed to verify correctness without exposing genetic datasets (Cho et al., 2022).

• Pharmaceutical Regulatory Compliance In drug development, regulators and peer reviewers must verify model predictions and analytical processes. But doing so often reveals proprietary model logic or compound data (Mora et al., 2022).

Limitations of Existing Technologies

• Blockchain-based Provenance Blockchains offer immutability and transparency, enabling audit trails and reproducibility verification (Mora et al., 2022; Hasselgren et al., 2020). However, they do not guarantee confidentiality—intermediate results or unencrypted metadata may still leak sensitive information.

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) ZKPs can verify computational correctness without revealing inputs or outputs. While promising, they often introduce prohibitive computational overhead—especially in complex biomedical tasks like genome-wide association studies or bioinformatics pipelines (Zhang et al., 2023).

Clearly, more scalable cryptographic frameworks are needed to ensure secure, transparent, and practical evaluation in decentralized biomedical contexts.

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Summary

The challenges at the data, model, and evaluation levels collectively demonstrate the limitations of current methods in biomedical research. Addressing these challenges requires new decentralized infrastructure that guarantees:

• Privacy across institutional boundaries

• Efficiency in real-world deployments

• Reproducibility for audit and regulation

The rest of this document proposes such a framework—built on encrypted data sharing, privacy-preserving model fine-tuning, and verifiable computation—to unlock the full potential of Biomedical Decentralized Science (BioDeSci).

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References

• Berger, B., et al. (2019). Federated learning in biomedical research.

• Cho, H., et al. (2022). Privacy-preserving genomic analysis. Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.

• Hasselgren, A., et al. (2020). Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences: A scoping review. J Med Internet Res.

• Kim, M., et al. (2021). Privacy-preserving federated learning in medicine. JAMIA.

• Mora, C., et al. (2022). The promises and pitfalls of decentralized science. Science.

• van Rossum, T., et al. (2023). Decentralized science: Towards open, transparent, and equitable biomedical research. Nature Biotechnology.

• Zhang, Y., et al. (2023). Zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving machine learning: A survey. ACM Computing Surveys.