Metaverse assisted Telesurgery in Healthcare 5.0: An interplay of Blockchain and Explainable AI

Smart healthcare has transitioned towards health-care 5.0, which allows ambient tracking of patients, emotive telemedicine, telesurgery, wellness monitoring, virtual clinics, and personalized care. Thus, the metaverse is a potential tool to leverage digital connectivity via improved healthcare experience in virtual environments. However, despite its potential benefits, patient’s sensitive information is captured, and digital avatars are created that interact with healthcare stakeholders for connected virtual care. As metaverse components are decentralized, blockchain (BC) is a potential solution to induce transparency and immutability in stored transactions on metaverse. For clinical decision support in BC-assisted metaverse enabled, Healthcare 5.0, accurate and interpretable diagnosis is critical. Thus, explainable AI (xAI) forms another critical component that provides trust in the healthcare informatics front. A dual solution of trusted informatics is possible via the interplay of BC and xAI in metaverse-enabled Healthcare 5.0. The article investigates the interplay through a proposed telesurgical scheme between patients, virtual hospitals, and doctors. Next, we discuss the potential challenges and present an experimental use-case of the benefits of our proposed architecture over traditional telesurgery systems.