MetaLung: Towards a Secure Architecture for Lung Cancer Patient Care on the Metaverse

The interest in metaverse applications by existing industries has seen massive growth thanks to the accelerated pace of research in key technological fields and the shift towards virtual interactions fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic. One key industry that can benefit from the integration into the metaverse is healthcare. The potential to provide enhanced care for patients affected by multiple health issues, from standard afflictions to more specialized pathologies, is being explored through the fabrication of architectures that can support metaverse applications. In this paper, we focus on the persistent issues of lung cancer detection, monitoring, and treatment, to propose MetaLung, a privacy and integrity-preserving architecture on the metaverse. We discuss the use cases to enable remote patient-doctor interactions, patient constant monitoring, and remote care. By leveraging technologies such as digital twins, edge computing, explainable AI, IoT, and virtual/augmented reality, we propose how the system could provide better assistance to lung cancer patients and suggest individualized treatment plans to the doctors based on their information. In addition, we describe the current implementation state of the AI-based Decision Support System for treatment selection, I3LUNG, and the current state of patient data collection.