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INTRODUCTION: Recent technological advances have increased the risk that de-identified brain images could be re-identified from face imagery. The Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a leading source of publicly available de-identified brain imaging, who quickly acted to protect participants privacy. METHODS: An independent expert committee evaluated 11 face-deidentification (de-facing) methods and selected four for formal testing. RESULTS: Effects of de-facing on brain measurements were comparable across methods and sufficiently small to recommend de-facing in ADNI. The committee ultimately recommended mri_reface for advantages in reliability, and for some practical considerations. ADNI leadership approved the committees recommendation, beginning in ADNI4. DISCUSSION: ADNI4 de-faces all applicable brain images before subsequent pre-processing, analyses, and public release. Trained analysts inspect de-faced images to confirm complete face removal and complete non-modification of brain. This paper details the history of the algorithm selection process and extensive validation, then describes the production workflows for de-facing in ADNI. HIGHLIGHTS: ADNI is implementing de-facing of MRI and PET beginning in ADNI4. De-facing alters face imagery in brain images to help protect privacy. Four algorithms were extensively compared for ADNI and mri_reface was chosen. Validation confirms mri_reface is robust and effective for ADNI sequences. Validation confirms mri_reface negligibly affects ADNI brain measurements.

Rationale and objectives: Defacing research MRI brain scans is often a mandatory step. With current defacing software, there are issues with Windows compatibility and researcher doubt regarding the adequacy of preservation of brain voxels in non-T1w scans. To address this, we developed PyFaceWipe, a multiplatform software for multiple MRI contrasts, which was evaluated based on its anonymisation ability and effect on downstream processing. Materials and methods: Multiple MRI brain scan contrasts from the OASIS-3 dataset were defaced with PyFaceWipe and PyDeface and manually assessed for brain voxel preservation, remnant facial features and effect on automated face detection. Original and PyFaceWipe-defaced data from locally acquired T1w structural scans underwent volumetry with FastSurfer and brain atlas generation with ANTS. Results: 214 MRI scans of several contrasts from OASIS-3 were successfully processed with both PyFaceWipe and PyDeface. PyFaceWipe maintained complete brain voxel preservation in all tested contrasts except ASL (45%) and DWI (90%), and PyDeface in all tested contrasts except ASL (95%), BOLD (25%), DWI (40%) and T2* (25%). Manual review of PyFaceWipe showed no failures of facial feature removal. Pinna removal was less successful (6% of T1 scans showed residual complete pinna). PyDeface achieved 5.1% failure rate. Automated detection found no faces in PyFaceWipe-defaced scans, 19 faces in PyDeface scans compared with 78 from the 224 original scans. Brain atlas generation showed no significant difference between atlases created from original and defaced data in both young adulthood and late elderly cohorts. Structural volumetry dice scores were ≥ 0.98 for all structures except for grey matter which had 0.93. PyFaceWipe output was identical across the tested operating systems. Conclusion: PyFaceWipe is a promising multiplatform defacing tool, demonstrating excellent brain voxel preservation and competitive defacing in multiple MRI contrasts, performing favourably against PyDeface. ASL, BOLD, DWI and T2* scans did not produce recognisable 3D renders and hence should not require defacing. Structural volumetry dice scores (≥ 0.98) were higher than previously published FreeSurfer results, except for grey matter which were comparable. The effect is measurable and care should be exercised during studies. ANTS atlas creation showed no significant effect from PyFaceWipe defacing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De-identification of DICOM images is an essential component of medical image research. While many established methods exist for the safe removal of protected health information (PHI) in DICOM metadata, approaches for the removal of PHI "burned-in" to image pixel data are typically manual, and automated high-throughput approaches are not well validated. Emerging optical character recognition (OCR) models can potentially detect and remove PHI-bearing text from medical images but are very time-consuming to run on the high volume of images found in typical research studies. We present a data processing method that performs metadata de-identification for all images combined with a targeted approach to only apply OCR to images with a high likelihood of burned-in text. The method was validated on a dataset of 415,182 images across ten modalities representative of the de-identification requests submitted at our institution over a 20-year span. Of the 12,578 images in this dataset with burned-in text of any kind, only 10 passed undetected with the method. OCR was only required for 6050 images (1.5% of the dataset). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PROSurvival project aims to improve the prediction of recurrencefree survival in prostate cancer by applying federated machine learning to whole slide images combined with selected clinical data. Both the image and clinical data will be aggregated into an anonymized dataset compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation and published under the principles of findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data. The DICOM standard will be used for the image data. For the accompanying clinical data, a human-readable, compact and flexible standard is yet to be defined. From the set of existing standards, mostly extendable with varying degrees of modifications, we chose oBDS as a starting point and modified it to include missing data points and to remove mandatory items not applicable to our dataset. Clinical and survival data from clinic-specific spreadsheets were converted into this modified standard, ensuring on-site data privacy during processing. For publication of the dataset, both image and clinical data are anonymized using established methods. The key challenges arose during the clinical data anonymization and in identifying research repositories meeting all of our requirements. Each clinic had to coordinate the publication with their responsible data protection officers, requiring different approval processes due to the individual states' differing interpretations of the legal regulations. The newly established German Health Data Utilization Act is expected to simplify future data sharing in a responsible and powerful way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract A large number of images are available on the Internet with the growth of social networking services, and many of them are face photos or contain faces. It is necessary to protect the privacy of face images to prevent their malicious use by face image de-identification techniques that make face recognition difficult, which prevent the collection of specific face images using face recognition. In this paper, we propose a face image de-identification method that generates a de-identified image from an input face image by embedding facial features extracted from that of another person into the input face image. We develop the novel framework for embedding facial features into a face image and loss functions based on images and features to de-identify a face image preserving its appearance. Through a set of experiments using public face image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits higher de-identification performance against unknown face recognition models than conventional methods while preserving the appearance of the input face images.

A large number of images are available on the Internet with the growth of social networking services, and many of them are face photos or contain faces. It is necessary to protect the privacy of face images to prevent their malicious use by face image de-identification techniques that make face recognition difficult, which prevent the collection of specific face images using face recognition. In this paper, we propose a face image de-identification method that generates a de-identified image from an input face image by embedding facial features extracted from that of another person into the input face image. We develop the novel framework for embedding facial features into a face image and loss functions based on images and features to de-identify a face image preserving its appearance. Through a set of experiments using public face image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits higher de-identification performance against unknown face recognition models than conventional methods while preserving the appearance of the input face images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

License plate (LP) information is an important part of personal privacy, which is protected by law. However, in some publicly available transportation datasets, the LP areas in the images have not been processed. Other datasets have applied simple de-identification operations such as blurring and masking. Such crude operations will lead to a reduction in data utility. In this paper, we propose a method of LP de-identification based on a generative adversarial network (LPDi GAN) to transform an original image to a synthetic one with a generated LP. To maintain the original LP attributes, the background features are extracted from the background to generate LPs that are similar to the originals. The LP template and LP style are also fed into the network to obtain synthetic LPs with controllable characters and higher quality. The results show that LPDi GAN can perceive changes in environmental conditions and LP tilt angles, and control the LP characters through the LP templates. The perceptual similarity metric, Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS), reaches 0.25 while ensuring the effect of character recognition on de-identified images, demonstrating that LPDi GAN can achieve outstanding de-identification while preserving strong data utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The recent rise of large language models has triggered renewed interest in medical free text data, which holds critical information about patients and diseases. However, medical free text is also highly sensitive. Therefore, de-identification is typically required but is complicated since medical free text is mostly unstructured. With the Masketeer algorithm, we present an effective tool to de-identify German medical text. Methods: We used an ensemble of different masking classes to remove references to identifiable data from over 35,000 clinical notes in accordance with the HIPAA Safe Harbor Guidelines. To retain additional context for readers, we implemented an entity recognition scheme and corpus-wide pseudonymization. Results: The algorithm performed with a sensitivity of 0.943 and specificity of 0.933. Further performance analyses showed linear runtime complexity (O(n)) with both increasing text length and corpus size. Conclusions: In the future, large language models will likely be able to de-identify medical free text more effectively and thoroughly than handcrafted rules. However, such gold-standard de-identification tools based on large language models are yet to emerge. In the current absence of such, we hope to provide best practices for a robust rule-based algorithm designed with expert domain knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present era, much data and operations are being processed online. Today, an individual or a business organization has to utilize the data or a process regardless of where they are working with the help of computers or smart devices. Most notably, the Internet of Things (IoT) allows devices like sensors to transfer data with the help of the Internet. Consequently, accessing data and processes from anywhere is becoming an essential requirement in the modern day. In the beginning ages of computing and even the Internet, data were stored in a centralized database and processed either on a local machine or on the server side. During those periods, users had to shell out vast amounts of money to store data and install software products. However, after the genesis of Cloud Computing (CC), the problem of investing amounts for storage and software installation became optimal. Nowadays, Cloud Companies offer various services to their users with essential security and authentication methods. Nevertheless, they cannot offer any elucidation regarding data privacy and do not provide any promise about data leakage on the cloud. Currently, a plethora of data privacy practices, like data anonymization, pseudonymization, scrambling and masking, etc., are implemented in CC to protect data privacy. This paper discusses a deep analysis of the merits and demerits of those methods, along with case studies and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ObjectivesClinical notes are a veritable treasure trove of information on a patient's disease progression, medical history, and treatment plans, yet are locked in secured databases accessible for research only after extensive ethics review. Removing personally identifying and protected health information (PII/PHI) from the records can reduce the need for additional Institutional Review Boards (IRB) reviews. In this project, our goals were to: (1) develop a robust and scalable clinical text de-identification pipeline that is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule for de-identification standards and (2) share routinely updated de-identified clinical notes with researchers.Materials and methodsBuilding on our open-source de-identification software called Philter, we added features to: (1) make the algorithm and the de-identified data HIPAA compliant, which also implies type 2 error-free redaction, as certified via external audit; (2) reduce over-redaction errors; and (3) normalize and shift date PHI. We also established a streamlined de-identification pipeline using MongoDB to automatically extract clinical notes and provide truly de-identified notes to researchers with periodic monthly refreshes at our institution.ResultsTo the best of our knowledge, the Philter V1.0 pipeline is currently the first and only certified, de-identified redaction pipeline that makes clinical notes available to researchers for nonhuman subjects' research, without further IRB approval needed. To date, we have made over 130 million certified de-identified clinical notes available to over 600 UCSF researchers. These notes were collected over the past 40 years, and represent data from 2757016 UCSF patients.

Respect for research participant rights is a key aspect for consideration when creating and utilizing interoperable data. From that perspective, requirements for sharing research data often call for the data to be de-identified, i.e., the removal of all personal identifying information (PII) prior to data sharing, to ensure that the participant’s data privacy rights are not infringed upon. However, what constitutes PII is often a point of confusion amongst researchers who are not familiar with privacy laws and regulations. This paper hopes to provide some clarity around what makes research data identifiable by presenting it under a different perspective from what most researchers are familiar with. It also provides a framework to help researchers determine where PII could exist within their data that they can use to help with privacy impact evaluations. The goal is to empower researchers to share their data with greater confidence that the privacy rights of their research subjects have been sufficiently protected, enabling access to greater amounts of data for research use.

Abstract Many state-of-the-art results in natural language processing (NLP) rely on large pre-trained language models (PLMs). These models consist of large amounts of parameters that are tuned using vast amounts of training data. These factors cause the models to memorize parts of their training data, making them vulnerable to various privacy attacks. This is cause for concern, especially when these models are applied in the clinical domain, where data are very sensitive. Training data pseudonymization is a privacy-preserving technique that aims to mitigate these problems. This technique automatically identifies and replaces sensitive entities with realistic but non-sensitive surrogates. Pseudonymization has yielded promising results in previous studies. However, no previous study has applied pseudonymization to both the pre-training data of PLMs and the fine-tuning data used to solve clinical NLP tasks. This study evaluates the effects on the predictive performance of end-to-end pseudonymization of Swedish clinical BERT models fine-tuned for five clinical NLP tasks. A large number of statistical tests are performed, revealing minimal harm to performance when using pseudonymized fine-tuning data. The results also find no deterioration from end-to-end pseudonymization of pre-training and fine-tuning data. These results demonstrate that pseudonymizing training data to reduce privacy risks can be done without harming data utility for training PLMs.

Many state-of-the-art results in natural language processing (NLP) rely on large pre-trained language models (PLMs). These models consist of large amounts of parameters that are tuned using vast amounts of training data. These factors cause the models to memorize parts of their training data, making them vulnerable to various privacy attacks. This is cause for concern, especially when these models are applied in the clinical domain, where data are very sensitive. Training data pseudonymization is a privacy-preserving technique that aims to mitigate these problems. This technique automatically identifies and replaces sensitive entities with realistic but non-sensitive surrogates. Pseudonymization has yielded promising results in previous studies. However, no previous study has applied pseudonymization to both the pre-training data of PLMs and the fine-tuning data used to solve clinical NLP tasks. This study evaluates the effects on the predictive performance of end-to-end pseudonymization of Swedish clinical BERT models fine-tuned for five clinical NLP tasks. A large number of statistical tests are performed, revealing minimal harm to performance when using pseudonymized fine-tuning data. The results also find no deterioration from end-to-end pseudonymization of pre-training and fine-tuning data. These results demonstrate that pseudonymizing training data to reduce privacy risks can be done without harming data utility for training PLMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of open data, identifiability of individuals based on 3D renderings obtained from routine structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the head has become a growing privacy concern. To protect subject privacy, several algorithms have been developed to de‐identify imaging data using blurring, defacing or refacing. Completely removing facial structures provides the best re‐identification protection but can significantly impact post‐processing steps, like brain morphometry. As an alternative, refacing methods that replace individual facial structures with generic templates have a lower effect on the geometry and intensity distribution of original scans, and are able to provide more consistent post‐processing results by the price of higher re‐identification risk and computational complexity. In the current study, we propose a novel method for anonymized face generation for defaced 3D T1‐weighted scans based on a 3D conditional generative adversarial network. To evaluate the performance of the proposed de‐identification tool, a comparative study was conducted between several existing defacing and refacing tools, with two different segmentation algorithms (FAST and Morphobox). The aim was to evaluate (i) impact on brain morphometry reproducibility, (ii) re‐identification risk, (iii) balance between (i) and (ii), and (iv) the processing time. The proposed method takes 9 s for face generation and is suitable for recovering consistent post‐processing results after defacing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The German Medical Text Project (GeMTeX) is one of the largest infrastructure efforts targeting German-language clinical documents. We here introduce the architecture of the de-identification pipeline of GeMTeX. Methods: This pipeline comprises the export of raw clinical documents from the local hospital information system, the import into the annotation platform INCEpTION, fully automatic pre-tagging with protected health information (PHI) items by the Averbis Health Discovery pipeline, a manual curation step of these preannotated data, and, finally, the automatic replacement of PHI items with typeconformant substitutes. This design was implemented in a pilot study involving six annotators and two curators each at the Data Integration Centers of the University Hospitals Leipzig and Erlangen. Results: As a proof of concept, the publicly available Graz Synthetic Text Clinical Corpus (GRASSCO) was enhanced with PHI annotations in an annotation campaign for which reasonable inter-annotator agreement values of Krippendorff's α ≈ 0.97 can be reported. Conclusion: These curated 1.4 K PHI annotations are released as open-source data constituting the first publicly available German clinical language text corpus with PHI metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing biomedical data for research can help to improve disease understanding and support the development of preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic methods. However, it is vital to balance the amount of data shared and the sharing mechanism chosen with the privacy protection provided. This requires a detailed understanding of potential adversaries who might attempt to re-identify data and the consequences of their actions. The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive list of potential types of adversaries, motivations, and harms to targeted individuals. A group of 13 researchers performed a three-step process in a one-day workshop, involving the identification of adversaries, the categorization by motivation, and the deduction of potential harms. The group collected 28 suggestions and categorized them into six types, each associated with several of six distinct harms. The findings align with previous efforts in structuring threat actors and outcomes and we believe that they provide a robust foundation for evaluating re-identification risks and developing protection measures in health data sharing scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical research plays a crucial role within scientific research. Technological advancements, especially those related to the rise of machine learning, pave the way for the exploration of medical issues that were once beyond reach. Unstructured textual data, such as correspondence between doctors, operative reports, etc., often serve as a starting point for many medical applications.However, for obvious privacy reasons, researchers do not legally have the right to access these documents as long as they contain sensitive data, as defined by regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). De-identification, meaning the detection, removal or substitution of all sensitive information, is therefore a necessary step to facilitate the sharing of these data between the medical field and research. Over the past decade, various approaches have been proposed to de-identify medical textual data. However, while entity detection is a well-known task in the natural language processing field, it presents some specific challenges in the medical context. Moreover, existing substitution methods proposed in the literature often pay little attention to the medical relevance of de-identified data or are not very resilient to attacks.This paper addresses these challenges. Firstly, an efficient system for detecting sensitive entities in French medical data and then accurately substitute them was implemented. Secondly, robust strategies for generating substitutes that incorporate the medical utility of the data were provided, thereby minimizing the difference in utility between the original and de-identified data, and that mathematically ensure privacy protection. Thirdly, the utility of the de-identification system in a context of ICD-10 code association was evaluated. Finally, various systems developed to tackle ICD-10 code association were presented while providing a state-of-the-art model in French.

The paper aims to evaluate and provide a comparative analysis of the performance and fine-tuning cost of various Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM, Bard, and Llama in automating the de-identification of Protected Health Information (PHI) from medical records, ensuring patient and healthcare professional privacy. Zero-shot learning was utilized initially to assess the capabilities of these LLMs in de-identifying medical data. Subsequently, each model was fine-tuned with varying training set sizes to observe changes in performance. The study also investigates the impact of the specificity of prompts on the accuracy of de-identification tasks. Fine-tuning LLMs with specific examples significantly enhanced the accuracy of the de-identification process, surpassing the zero-shot learning accuracy of pre-trained counterparts. Notably, a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model with a few-shot learning technique was able to exceed the performance of a zero-shot learning GPT-4 model, with 99% accuracy. Detailed prompts resulted in higher task accuracy across all models, yet fine-tuned models with brief instructions still outperformed pre-trained models given detailed prompts. Also, the fine-tuned models were more resilient to medical record format change than the zero-shot models. Code, calculations, and comparisons are available at https://github.com/YashwanthYS/De-Identification-of-medical-Records. The findings underscore the potential of LLMs, particularly when fine-tuned, to effectively automate the de-identification of PHI in medical records. The study highlights the importance of model training and prompt specificity in achieving high accuracy in de-identification tasks.

Safeguarding personal identity in various surveillance videos, dashcams, and on-street videos is crucial. One way to do this is to detect faces and blur them, but a better solution is to replace them with non-existent ones to maintain the naturalness of the videos. While face swapping methods have already been used in the media industry with high-quality faces, it is challenging to apply them for identity protection to faces in-the-wild where faces are often occluded and of low-resolution. Therefore, we propose a new framework for face swapping specifically designed to work with face images taken in real-world scenarios, making it useful as a privacy protection method. To tackle the issue of low-resolution images, we introduce a Cross-Resolution Contrastive Loss (CRCL) technique, which allows our neural network model to be trained using triplets of varying resolutions. This enables the model to learn and use identity information across different resolutions, thereby improving its accuracy. We also propose a plug-and-play framework that can be easily applied to existing face swapping models to handle occlusions. By explicit swapping of facial features and filling of occluded regions, our framework provides a more seamless blend. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in handling faces in-the-wild, we create an occluded VGGFace2 dataset consisting of face images augmented with various facial masks and hand occlusions. Through quantitative and qualitative assessments on this dataset, our proposed method demonstrates robust performance under low-resolution or occluded scenarios. Significant improvements are made in the quality of swapped faces while preserving their identity and attributes, highlighting the effectiveness of our framework in advancing face swapping as a reliable privacy protection measure.

Along with the creation of medical profiles of patients, Electronic Health Records have several secondary missions, such as health economy and research. The recent, increasing adoption of a common standard, i.e., the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), makes it easier to exchange medical data among the several parties involved, for example, in an epidemiological research activity. However, this exchange process is hindered by regulatory frameworks due to privacy issues related to the presence of personal information, which allows patients to be identified directly (or indirectly) from their medical data. When properly used, de-identification techniques can provide crucial support in overcoming these problems. FHIR-DIET aims to bring flexibility and concreteness to the implementation of de-identification of health data, supporting many customised data-processing behaviours that can be easily configured and tailored to match specific use case requirements. Our solution enables faster and easier cooperation between legal and IT professionals to establish and implement de-identification rules. The performance evaluation demonstrates the viability of processing hundreds of FHIR patient information data per second using standard hardware. We believe FHIR-DIET can be a valuable tool to satisfy the current regulation requirements and help to create added-value for the secondary use of healthcare data.

The proliferation of media-sharing platforms has led to issues with illegally edited content and the distribution of pornography. To protect personal information, de-identification technologies are being developed to prevent facial identification. Existing de-identification methods directly alter the pixel values in the face region, leading to reduced feature representation and identification accuracy. This study aims to develop a method that minimizes the possibility of personal identification while effectively preserving important features for image- and video-copy-detection tasks, proposing a new deep-learning-based de-identification approach that surpasses traditional pixel-based alteration methods. We introduce two de-identification models using different approaches: one emphasizing the contours of the original face through feature inversion and the other generating a blurred version of the face using D2GAN (Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Network). Both models were evaluated on their performance in image- and video-copy-detection tasks before and after de-identification, demonstrating effective feature preservation. This research presents new possibilities for personal-information protection and digital-content security, contributing to digital-rights management and law enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secondary analysis of digital psychological data (DPD) is an increasingly popular method for behavioral health research. Under current practices, secondary research does not require human subjects research review so long as data are de-identified. We argue that this standard approach to the ethics of secondary research (i.e., de-identification) does not address a range of ethical risks and that greater emphasis should be placed on the ethical principle of justice. We outline the inadequacy of an individually focused research ethic for DPD and describe unaddressed "social risks" generated by secondary research of DPD. These risks exist in the "circumstances of justice": that is, a circumstance where individuals must cooperate to create a public good (e.g., research knowledge), and where it is impractical to individually exempt individuals. This requires researchers to emphasize the just allocation of benefits and burdens against a background of social cooperation. We explore six considerations for researchers who wish to conduct research with DPD without explicit consent: (a) create socially valuable knowledge, (b) fairly share the benefits and burdens of research, (c) be transparent about data use, (d) create mechanisms for withdrawal of data, (e) ensure that stakeholders can provide input into the design and implementation of the research, and (f) responsibly report results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, biomedical imaging data play an important role in scientific research and clinical application, but the available resources are limited. Here we present Open Biomedical Imaging Archive (OBIA), a repository for archiving biomedical imaging and related clinical data. OBIA adopts five data objects (Collection, Individual, Study, Series, and Image) for data organization, and accepts the submission of biomedical images of multiple modalities, organs, and diseases. In order to protect personal privacy, OBIA has formulated a unified de-identification and quality control process. In addition, OBIA provides friendly and intuitive web interfaces for data submission, browsing, and retrieval, as well as image retrieval. As of September 2023, OBIA has housed data for a total of 937 individuals, 4136 studies, 24,701 series, and 1,938,309 images covering 9 modalities and 30 anatomical sites. Collectively, OBIA provides a reliable platform for biomedical imaging data management and offers free open access to all publicly available data to support research activities throughout the world. OBIA can be accessed at https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/obia.

Background: The recent rise of large language models has triggered renewed interest in medical free text data, which holds critical information about patients and diseases. However, medical free text is also highly sensitive. Therefore, de-identification is typically required but is complicated since medical free text is mostly unstructured. With the Masketeer algorithm, we present an effective tool to de-identify German medical text. Methods: We used an ensemble of different masking classes to remove references to identifiable data from over 35,000 clinical notes in accordance with the HIPAA Safe Harbor Guidelines. To retain additional context for readers, we implemented an entity recognition scheme and corpus-wide pseudonymization. Results: The algorithm performed with a sensitivity of 0.943 and specificity of 0.933. Further performance analyses showed linear runtime complexity (O(n)) with both increasing text length and corpus size. Conclusions: In the future, large language models will likely be able to de-identify medical free text more effectively and thoroughly than handcrafted rules. However, such gold-standard de-identification tools based on large language models are yet to emerge. In the current absence of such, we hope to provide best practices for a robust rule-based algorithm designed with expert domain knowledge.

License plate (LP) information is an important part of personal privacy, which is protected by law. However, in some publicly available transportation datasets, the LP areas in the images have not been processed. Other datasets have applied simple de-identification operations such as blurring and masking. Such crude operations will lead to a reduction in data utility. In this paper, we propose a method of LP de-identification based on a generative adversarial network (LPDi GAN) to transform an original image to a synthetic one with a generated LP. To maintain the original LP attributes, the background features are extracted from the background to generate LPs that are similar to the originals. The LP template and LP style are also fed into the network to obtain synthetic LPs with controllable characters and higher quality. The results show that LPDi GAN can perceive changes in environmental conditions and LP tilt angles, and control the LP characters through the LP templates. The perceptual similarity metric, Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS), reaches 0.25 while ensuring the effect of character recognition on de-identified images, demonstrating that LPDi GAN can achieve outstanding de-identification while preserving strong data utility.

De-identification is a process to prevent individuals from being identified from original transaction data by processing personal identification information. k-anonymization, which processes data so that at least k users have the same records, is one of the representative methods of de-identification. One of the methods of k-anonymization is adding dummy records into the data to protect users who have unique histories. For this method, the cost for k-anonymization is the difference in the number of records between the original data and the processed data, and it can be calculated only after deciding the parameter k and processing data. However, we want to calculate the cost before processing and find the optimal value of k because processing the big data with various k is very costly. In this paper, we propose a new model of transaction data that gives us a probability distribution and an expected value of values in data under the assumption that all values occur independently with uniform probability. Applying our data model, it is possible to evaluate the cost of k-anonymized data even before processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity disclosure risk is an essential consideration in data anonymization aimed at preserving privacy and utility. The risk is regionally dependent. Therefore, there is a need for a regional empirical approach in addition to a theoretical approach in modeling disclosure risk estimation. Reviewed literature pointed to three influencers of the risk. However, we did not find literature on the combined effects of the three influencers and their predictive power. To fill the gap, this study modeled the risk estimation predicated on the combined effect of the three predictors using the Kenyan situation. The study validated the model by conducting an actual re-identification quasi-experiment. The adversary’s analytical competence, distinguishing power of the anonymized datasets, and linkage mapping of the identified datasets are presented as the predictors of the risk estimation. For each predictor, manifest variables are presented. Our presented model extends previous models and is capable of producing a realistic risk estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Epidemiological research may require linkage of information from multiple organizations. This can bring two problems: (1) the information governance desirability of linkage without sharing direct identifiers, and (2) a requirement to link databases without a common person-unique identifier. Methods We develop a Bayesian matching technique to solve both. We provide an open-source software implementation capable of de-identified probabilistic matching despite discrepancies, via fuzzy representations and complete mismatches, plus de-identified deterministic matching if required. We validate the technique by testing linkage between multiple medical records systems in a UK National Health Service Trust, examining the effects of decision thresholds on linkage accuracy. We report demographic factors associated with correct linkage. Results The system supports dates of birth (DOBs), forenames, surnames, three-state gender, and UK postcodes. Fuzzy representations are supported for all except gender, and there is support for additional transformations, such as accent misrepresentation, variation for multi-part surnames, and name re-ordering. Calculated log odds predicted a proband’s presence in the sample database with an area under the receiver operating curve of 0.997–0.999 for non-self database comparisons. Log odds were converted to a decision via a consideration threshold θ and a leader advantage threshold δ. Defaults were chosen to penalize misidentification 20-fold versus linkage failure. By default, complete DOB mismatches were disallowed for computational efficiency. At these settings, for non-self database comparisons, the mean probability of a proband being correctly declared to be in the sample was 0.965 (range 0.931–0.994), and the misidentification rate was 0.00249 (range 0.00123–0.00429). Correct linkage was positively associated with male gender, Black or mixed ethnicity, and the presence of diagnostic codes for severe mental illnesses or other mental disorders, and negatively associated with birth year, unknown ethnicity, residential area deprivation, and presence of a pseudopostcode (e.g. indicating homelessness). Accuracy rates would be improved further if person-unique identifiers were also used, as supported by the software. Our two largest databases were linked in 44 min via an interpreted programming language. Conclusions Fully de-identified matching with high accuracy is feasible without a person-unique identifier and appropriate software is freely available.

We know that individuals' identities can become intertwined with institutions through processes of identification. But what happens when individuals need or desire to disentangle their identities from institutions after identification has taken place? In this paper, I examine previously incarcerated men's efforts to de-identify with the institutional logics associated with prison as they transition back into society. While past work has tended to characterize de-identification efforts as ultimately successful, I reveal how individuals can remain stuck in their identifications and experience identity paralysis. In doing so I add nuance to our understanding of de-identification by revealing the factors that can contribute to its breakdown and failure. I highlight specifically the importance of identity material and the content of institutional logics in influencing de-identification processes, and thus extend the existing focus on the cognitive accessibility of logics. Importantly, I reveal that challenges to de-identification result not merely from the individuals "holding on" to old targets but rather from their becoming stuck and resigning themselves to existing targets when they simultaneously feel they lack identity material to realize new identities and face negative social evaluations. Indeed my findings point to the powerful and durable ways in which institutions shape our identities even when we desire to change them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Using data in research often requires that the data first be de-identified, particularly in the case of health data, which often include Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and/or Personal Health Identifying Information (PHII). There are established procedures for de-identifying structured data, but de-identifying clinical notes, electronic health records, and other records that include free text data is more complex. Several different ways to achieve this are documented in the literature. This scoping review identifies categories of de-identification methods that can be used for free text data. Methods We adopted an established scoping review methodology to examine review articles published up to May 9, 2022, in Ovid MEDLINE; Ovid Embase; Scopus; the ACM Digital Library; IEEE Explore; and Compendex. Our research question was: What methods are used to de-identify free text data? Two independent reviewers conducted title and abstract screening and full-text article screening using the online review management tool Covidence. Results The initial literature search retrieved 3,312 articles, most of which focused primarily on structured data. Eighteen publications describing methods of de-identification of free text data met the inclusion criteria for our review. The majority of the included articles focused on removing categories of personal health information identified by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The de-identification methods they described combined rule-based methods or machine learning with other strategies such as deep learning. Conclusion Our review identifies and categorises de-identification methods for free text data as rule-based methods, machine learning, deep learning and a combination of these and other approaches. Most of the articles we found in our search refer to de-identification methods that target some or all categories of PHII. Our review also highlights how de-identification systems for free text data have evolved over time and points to hybrid approaches as the most promising approach for the future.

Many legal, ethical, and regulatory frameworks allow de-identified health data to be shared for research without patients’ opt-in consent. However, there may be public concerns about this practice, as people may feel they should have some say in how such data is used. This paper introduces the concept of the “inalienability of de-identified data,” to describe a key assumption underlying that public concern and preference. The assumption, derived from ethnographic research with public and professional stakeholders in AI driven medical image analysis over the past two years, refers to a sense of felt ownership over de-identified health data, even where the subject has been obscured as referent and no clear legal rights of data ownership otherwise exist. The concept is important to medical ethics because it underpins public expectations regarding the rights people should have over the sharing of medical data (including expectations for consent). We note that where those expectations go counter to current legal and bioethical frameworks for de-identified data sharing, they provide a challenge for public support of big data and artificial intelligence driven health research.

The utilization of literature as a tool, commencing in 1934 with the adoption of the socialist realism method, has had a profound impact on Kyrgyz literature. Along with literature, this influence extended to societal foundations such as religion, history, and language, which are integral components of both the societal order and national identity. In this context, literary works, in a way, invited the people to the revolution and the party with negative narratives about religion, language, and history, acting as the mouthpiece of the party. To a certain extent, literature became a tool for creating a higher identity by disrupting the societal structure of Turkic peoples. To achieve this goal, the cultural and belief structures of society were shaped in accordance with Marxism, the foundation of the socialist regime, and thus the thoughts of Marx. Therefore, religion in Kyrgyz literature is highlighted as an emptied and transformed phenomenon, seen as an obstacle to socialism. Some writers, however, chose a critical discourse against the corruption of religion and the de-identification policy. At this point, a strong relationship and differences between writer-era and ideological perspectives come into play. In Soviet and post-Soviet Kyrgyz literature, the reflections of religion can be found in various literary genres such as poetry, short stories, novels, and theater. This article adopts an ideological lens to examine the representation of religion in Kyrgyz literature. In doing so, it explores the traces of Marxist and Leninist ideologies in the context of identity formation and de-identification, while also delving into the strategies employed to preserve the "We" identity, which was targeted for erasure or dilution. A survey of literary works spanning from the earliest productions to contemporary pieces reveals instances that align with both approaches. In the works of pro-Soviet writers, religion is portrayed as a means to dismantle identity, whereas in the works of those with opposing viewpoints, it emerges as a tool for identity preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations that manage Personally Identifiable Information cannot share this information directly due to legal restrictions. Meanwhile, there are several solutions that support the anonymization of these types of data to make these available to a wider audience. For these solutions, it is important that the corresponding anonymization modules guarantee legal properties. In general, due to the scale and complexity of the software, it is difficult to prove that it does not violate these properties in some cases. This article proposes a new approach that addresses this challenge. The approach provides a software component that checks the output of an anonymization module against editable legal constraints—the Privacy-Enhancing Verification Component (PE-VC). An organization can formulate these constraints separately from the software using the new Compliance Assertion Language. Because the PE-VC is a carefully developed and verified module that can be used without modification for different anonymization modules, an auditor only needs to check the specified assertions and not the software itself. This approach ensures a much higher level of confidence in the correctness of the output of an anonymization software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new method that can guarantee strong privacy while minimizing information loss in transactional data composed of a set of each attribute value in a relational database, which is not generally well-known structured data. The proposed scheme adopts the same top-down partitioning algorithm as the existing k-anonymity model, using local generalization to optimize safety and CPU execution time. At the same time, the information loss rate, which is a disadvantage of the existing local generalization, is further improved by reallocating transactions through an additional bottom-up tree search process after the partitioning process. Our scheme shows a very fast processing time compared to the HgHs algorithm using generalization and deletion techniques. In terms of information loss, our scheme shows much better performance than any schemes proposed so far, such as the existing local generalization or HgHs algorithm. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our algorithm, the experiment compared its performance with the existing local generalization and the HgHs algorithm, in terms of both execution time and information loss rate. As a result of the experiment, for example, when k is 5 in k-anonymity for the dataset BMS-WebView-2, the execution time of our scheme is up to 255 times faster than the HgHs algorithm, and with regard to the information loss rate, our method showed a maximum rate of 62.37 times lower than the local generalization algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the draft Code of Conduct for Research's interpretation of core concepts in the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). It recommends improvements, including removing provisions on consent for future research, clarifying the status of special personal information, not excluding individual researchers from being responsible parties, and distinguishing de-identification in POPIA from other jurisdictions.

Head CT, which includes the facial region, can visualize faces using 3D reconstruction, raising concern that individuals may be identified. We developed a new de-identification technique that distorts the faces of head CT images. Head CT images that were distorted were labeled as "original images" and the others as "reference images." Reconstructed face models of both were created, with 400 control points on the facial surfaces. All voxel positions in the original image were moved and deformed according to the deformation vectors required to move to corresponding control points on the reference image. Three face detection and identification programs were used to determine face detection rates and match confidence scores. Intracranial volume equivalence tests were performed before and after deformation, and correlation coefficients between intracranial pixel value histograms were calculated. Output accuracy of the deep learning model for intracranial segmentation was determined using Dice Similarity Coefficient before and after deformation. The face detection rate was 100%, and match confidence scores were < 90. Equivalence testing of the intracranial volume revealed statistical equivalence before and after deformation. The median correlation coefficient between intracranial pixel value histograms before and after deformation was 0.9965, indicating high similarity. Dice Similarity Coefficient values of original and deformed images were statistically equivalent. We developed a technique to de-identify head CT images while maintaining the accuracy of deep-learning models. The technique involves deforming images to prevent face identification, with minimal changes to the original information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]