Open source tools for standardized privacy protection of medical images
2011
In addition to the primary care context, medical images are often useful for research projects and community healthcare
networks, so-called "secondary use". Patient privacy becomes an issue in such scenarios since the disclosure of personal
health information (PHI) has to be prevented in a sharing environment. In general, most PHIs should be completely
removed from the images according to the respective privacy regulations, but some basic and alleviated data is usually
required for accurate image interpretation. Our objective is to utilize and enhance these specifications in order to provide
reliable software implementations for de- and re-identification of medical images suitable for online and offline delivery.
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) images are de-identified by replacing PHI-specific
information with values still being reasonable for imaging diagnosis and patient indexing. In this paper, this approach is
evaluated based on a prototype implementation built on top of the open source framework DCMTK (DICOM Toolkit)
utilizing standardized de- and re-identification mechanisms. A set of tools has been developed for DICOM de-identification
that meets privacy requirements of an offline and online sharing environment and fully relies on standard-based
methods.
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