NEC claims world-first facial recognition system for genomic custom cancer vaccines

A news release says NEC Corporation has developed and successfully demonstrated a facial recognition system for personalized cancer vaccine therapies. The firm says the biometric tool for the healthcare market does not store patients’ face data “and ensures traceability through the entire workflow process.”

NEC claims a world-first accomplishment “aligned with the practical workflow expected for personalized cancer vaccine therapies.”

The company explains that personalized cancer vaccines are developed according to patients’ genomic data. This means highly reliable identification is necessary to make sure they are administered to the correct patient. “In addition to verifying patients’ names and IDs, biometric recognition can further enhance identification reliability when collecting samples or administering vaccines. However, the use of biometric recognition requires the secure management of biometric information.”

NEC proprietary digital signature technology enables face recognition without storing facial information by converting facial image data into key information. Authentication is then performed using the key data, to ensure the reliability of vaccine administration while avoiding the risk of face biometrics data being misused or leaked.

NEC’s product also features tampering detection technology that groups genomic data and assigns validation tags accordingly, to reduce the amount of tag data by 90 percent while maintaining tamper detection accuracy, thereby limiting costs.

Healthcare environments can be hectic, and NEC was wise to give its biometric tech a spin in a simulation. “To verify the capabilities of these technologies, NEC built an environment that simulates the actual workflow for personalized cancer vaccines,” says the release. “In tests that simulated mix-ups of patients or samples, it was confirmed that the biometric based digital signature technology can correctly detect a mix-up before a vaccine is administered, and that the tampering detection technology can detect if genomic data has been tampered with.”

In addition to facial recognition for the patient side, NEC has also developed technologies to enhance vaccine manufacturing management.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  healthcare  |  NEC  |  vaccinations