De-Identifying Swedish EHR Text Using Public Resources in the General Domain.

Sensitive data is normally required to develop rule-based or train machine learning-based models for de-identifying electronic health record (EHR) clinical notes; and this presents important problems for patient privacy. In this study,we add non-sensitive public datasets to EHR training data; (i) scientific medical textand (ii) Wikipedia word vectors. The data, all in Swedish, is used to train a deep learning model using recurrent neural networks. Tests on pseudonymized Swedish EHR clinical notes showed improved precision and recall from 55.62% and 80.02%with the base EHR embedding layer, to 85.01% and 87.15% when Wikipedia word vectors are added. These results suggest that non-sensitive text from the general domain can be used to train robust models for de-identifying Swedish clinical text;and this could be useful in cases where the data is both sensitive and in low-resource languages [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]