Healthcare big data processing mechanisms: The role of cloud computing

Abstract Recently, patient safety and healthcare have gained high attention in professional and health policy-makers. This rapid growth causes generating a high amount of data, which is known as big data. Therefore, handling and processing of this data are attracted great attention. Cloud computing is one of the main choices for handling and processing of this type of data. But, as far as we know, the detailed review and deep discussion in this filed are very rare. Therefore, this paper reviews and discusses the recently introduced mechanisms in this field as well as providing a deep analysis of their applied mechanisms. Moreover, the drawbacks and benefits of the reviewed mechanisms have been discussed and the main challenges of these mechanisms are highlighted for developing more efficient healthcare big data processing techniques over cloud computing in the future.