title: FORESEE: Fully Outsourced secuRe gEnome Study basEd on homomorphic Encryption.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The increasing availability of genome data motivates massive research studies in personalized treatment and precision medicine. Public cloud services provide a flexible way to mitigate the storage and computation burden in conducting genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, data privacy has been widely concerned when sharing the sensitive information in a cloud environment.
  
  
  METHODS
  We presented a novel framework (FORESEE: Fully Outsourced secuRe gEnome Study basEd on homomorphic Encryption) to fully outsource GWAS (i.e., chi-square statistic computation) using homomorphic encryption. The proposed framework enables secure divisions over encrypted data. We introduced two division protocols (i.e., secure errorless division and secure approximation division) with a trade-off between complexity and accuracy in computing chi-square statistics.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The proposed framework was evaluated for the task of chi-square statistic computation with two case-control datasets from the 2015 iDASH genome privacy protection challenge. Experimental results show that the performance of FORESEE can be significantly improved through algorithmic optimization and parallel computation. Remarkably, the secure approximation division provides significant performance gain, but without missing any significance SNPs in the chi-square association test using the aforementioned datasets.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Unlike many existing HME based studies, in which final results need to be computed by the data owner due to the lack of the secure division operation, the proposed FORESEE framework support complete outsourcing to the cloud and output the final encrypted chi-square statistics.
authors.forename: Yuchen
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Wenrui
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Dai
authors.forename: Xiaoqian
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Hongkai
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xiong
authors.forename: Shuang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000067917:Cloud Computing / Q000592:standards*; D016494:Computer Security / Q000592:standards*; D030661:Genetic Privacy / Q000592:standards*; D055106:Genome-Wide Association Study / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D020416:Outsourced Services / Q000592:standards