A new partnership unveiled last week between Neuromation and Longenesis will seek to use blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to build a global marketplace for healthcare data.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CSO of Longenesis, a healthcare AI company headquartered in Hong Kong, said the collaboration with Neuromation will be two-fold.

“First, we’ll train the deep neural networks we need processing power and we are looking to repurpose the cryptocurrency mining equipment to do that. Second, to generate synthetic data, we must train on large data sets of real-world data and have balanced and diverse data sets. Neuromation is an obvious consumer of data and can be a part of the marketplace,” Zhavoronkov explained. “The primary aim of Longenesis is to create a global data marketplace that will help provide personalized but at the same time secure data for healthcare application developers. Hence, the missions of Neuromation and Longenesis are perfectly complementary to each other.”

Longenesis is a decentralized medical record marketplace for life data such as medical records, social network and health data. The platform allows individuals to store and monetize their own data, including blood test results, medical history, genetic profile and other sensitive information in a blockchain-based marketplace. The project was initiated in 2017 by the BitFury Group and medical AI firm Insilico Medicine.

Estonian startup Neuromation is building a distributed computing platform for the generation of deep learning applications and synthetic data. Designed for the AI ecosystem, the platform will allow users to create datasets, generators and train deep learning models. Through the marketplace, users would be able to contribute to or buy already existing datasets and models.

Neuromation raised more than US$70 million in one of the largest ICOs in January, according to data from Coinist. The startup already won several awards and has signed partnerships with OSA Hybrid Platform and Let’s Enhance, among others.

Zhavoronkov said the collaboration will seek to provide AI practitioners in medicine and healthcare with both the data and the computational power needed to train AI models. “By announcing this partnership, we are laying the foundation for the future world of individualized healthcare based on AI,” he said.

AI in the healthcare sector uses algorithms and software to mimic human ability in analyzing complex medical data. The ever-growing amount of healthcare data has been pushing the development of AI applications.

According to a Frost & Sullivan study, healthcare AI is expanding by an annual rate of 40%. The firm expects global revenue generated by AI systems to soar to US$6.7 billion by 2021 from US$811 million in 2015.

Meanwhile, an IBM Institute for Business Value blockchain study called Healthcare Rallies for Blockchain, found that healthcare executives are not just experimenting with blockchain but actually expecting to have commercial blockchain solutions implemented at scale in the few years to come.