PHEMS (short for “Pediatric Hospitals as European drivers for multi-party computation and synthetic data generation capabilities across clinical specialities and data types”) is a Europe-wide consortium of paediatric hospitals that:
...aims to revolutionize the way health data is managed and utilized across Europe. This project is particularly focused on addressing the challenges posed by privacy concerns and the complexity of data sharing due to varying interpretations of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). By developing a decentralized and open health data ecosystem, PHEMS strives to facilitate easier access to health data, thereby advancing federated health data analysis and creating services for generating shareable synthetic datasets.
As a technical partner of the project Aridhia has developed the Federated Node an open source component for running federated tasks.
The Federated Node is based on three existing open source projects:
The Common API provides the structure of the API calls, Keycloak is used for token and user management, and Nginx is used as a reverse proxy. The FN needs to be deployed to a Kubernetes cluster, and requires a Postgres database for storing user credentials.
| Description | |
|---|---|
| 1a | Before creating the task pod, the FN checks if the docker image needed can be found in any of the docker container registries associated with the FN |
| 1b | The task pod is created and the results are saved in the storage account |
| 2 | On /results calls, if the task pod is on completed status, a job is created. |
| 3 | The job's pod will have the 2 storage environments mounted. It fetches the tasks result folder and zips it |
| 4 | The webserver reads the zip contents from the live job pod and saves it in its own storage account environment. |
| 5 | The resulting archive is returned to the end user |
Licences for the component projects can be found here.
See the DEPLOYMENT document.
helm upgrade federatednode ./k8s/federated-nodeMinikube or microk8s is required.
./scripts/run_local.sh minikube
# or
./scripts/run_local.sh microThis will launch a Minikube cluster called federatednode (if using minikube), and apply the helm chart with the default values.yaml.
Open the nginx port with
kubectl port-forward -n ingress-nginx svc/ingress-nginx-controller 443Also add the custom host url to the hosts list
On Windows: C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
On WSL/Linux: /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 host-url