A Decentralized and Autonomous Blockchain-Based Medical Physics Education Platform: Toward a New Paradigm
B Zhang1*, S Becker2, J Zhou3, S Chen4, B Yi5, (1) University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, (2) University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, (3) Rutgers - Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Belleville, NJ, (4) University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, (5) University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Presentations
PO-GePV-P-21 (Sunday, 7/25/2021) [Eastern Time (GMT-4)]
Purpose: Create a decentralized blockchain-based education platform to meet the modern medical physics education needs nationally and globally.
Methods: The platform uses on two enterprise-level open source packages: Open edX and Hyperleger Fabric. The Open edX platform is responsible for course creation and hosting while the Hyperledger-based blockchain manages the course system. The blockchain 1)grants course creation permission; 2)issues course completion certificate; and 3)validates the course certificate upon request. The chaincodes of the blockchain are implemented through Go programming language.
Results: We have successfully built up such a decentralized and autonomous education platform locally. An initial group of users such as all full or emeritus AAPM members can be enrolled through email verification and issued a private/public keypair. Other users are open to register and are subject to a single enrollment vote from an enrolled user. Any users can obtain time-constrained permission to create or modify a course, which are also subject to vote. Whether to publish a new course or a course improvement is also determined by consensus. Participation in the vote grants users reward points which determine the voting power of the user along with a power abuse prevention mechanism. Inactivity in participation would lead to the removal of a user. Furthermore, any activity be can monitored by any user anytime through the ledgers. Our local implementation is ready to migrate to a cloud-based environment.
Conclusion: This blockchain-based medical physics education platform does not have a centralized authority to control its access and contents. Anyone can suggest what to teach and what to learn. The platform enables a decision based on collective intelligence and helps to create medical physics courses from the needs of the users, by the talents and visions of the whole medical physics community. This also can provide free medical physics education globally.
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