Indexing for Healthcare Biometric Databases
Kamlesh Tiwari, Geetika Arora, Phalguni Gupta · Advances in medical technologies and clinical practice book series · 2018
The healthcare industry offers highly personalized services to its patients. It is necessary to correctly identify the patient and efficiently link his medical records as and when needed. It is important to note that the need of identification arises in many desperate scenarios when the patient may not be able to tell anything about himself. Biometrics can help in this scenario by using physiological or behavioral characteristics. Some of the biometrics traits could be acquired without direct participation of the person, and therefore, the patient need not provide any pin, password, or token for his identification. Biometrics can handle challenges of duplicate medical records and identity theft. However, there is an important issue that may arise when a large number of patients get registered to the system. Increase in the size of the biometric database gradually escalates the time required for identification. This calls for the need of an efficient indexing approach that can confine the search space and decrease the response time. This chapter highlights biometric indexing approaches suitable for the healthcare industry.