The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread rapidly in late 2019, has revealed that the use of computing and communication technologies provides significant aid in preventing, controlling, and combating infectious diseases. With the ongoing research in next-generation networking (NGN), the use of secure and reliable communication and networking is of utmost importance when dealing with users' health records and other sensitive information. Through the adaptation of artificial-intelligence-enabled NGN, the shape of healthcare systems can be altered to achieve smart and secure healthcare capable of coping with epidemics that may emerge at any given moment. In this article, we envision a cooperative and distributed healthcare framework that relies on state-of-the-art computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities, namely, federated learning, mobile edge computing, and blockchain, to enable epidemic (or suspicious infectious disease) discovery, remote monitoring, and fast health authority response. The introduced framework can also enable secure medical data exchange at the edge and between different health entities. This technique, coupled with the low latency and high bandwidth functionality of 5G and beyond networks, would enable mass surveillance, monitoring, and analysis to occur at the edge. Challenges, issues, and design guidelines are also discussed in this article with highlights on some trending solutions.

中文翻译：

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通过区块链辅助的人工智能网络预防和控制流行病


2019 年底迅速蔓延的 COVID-19 大流行表明，计算和通信技术的使用为预防、控制和对抗传染病提供了重要帮助。随着下一代网络 (NGN) 的研究不断深入，在处理用户的健康记录和其他敏感信息时，使用安全可靠的通信和网络至关重要。通过采用人工智能支持的NGN，可以改变医疗保健系统的形态，以实现智能、安全的医疗保健，能够应对任何特定时刻可能出现的流行病。在本文中，我们设想了一个合作式分布式医疗框架，该框架依赖于最先进的计算、通信和智能能力，即联邦学习、移动边缘计算和区块链，以实现流行病（或可疑传染病） ）发现、远程监控和快速卫生当局响应。引入的框架还可以实现边缘和不同健康实体之间的安全医疗数据交换。该技术与 5G 及其他网络的低延迟和高带宽功能相结合，将使大规模监视、监控和分析能够在边缘进行。本文还讨论了挑战、问题和设计指南，并重点介绍了一些趋势解决方案。