Masketeer: An Ensemble-Based Pseudonymization Tool with Entity Recognition for German Unstructured Medical Free Text

Author:

Baumgartner Martin12ORCID,Kreiner Karl1ORCID,Wiesmüller Fabian123,Hayn Dieter13ORCID,Puelacher Christian4,Schreier Günter12ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Center for Health and Bioresources, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, 8020 Graz, Austria

2. Institute of Neural Engineering, Graz University of Technology, 8010 Graz, Austria

3. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention, 5020 Salzburg, Austria

4. Department of Internal Medicine III, Cardiology and Angiology, University Hospital Innsbruck, Medical University Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Abstract

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.

Funder

state government of the Land Tirol

Publisher

MDPI AG

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