De-identifying Unstructured Medical Text and Attribute-based Utility Measurement

Abstract

De-identification is a method by which the remaining information can not be referred to a specific individual by removing the personal information from the data set. As a result, de-identification can lower the exposure risk of personal information that may occur in the process of collecting, processing, storing and distributing information. Although there have been many studies in de-identification algorithms, protection models, and etc., most of them are limited to structured data, and there are relatively few considerations on de-identification of unstructured data. Especially, in the medical field where the unstructured text is frequently used, many people simply remove all personally identifiable information in order to lower the exposure risk of personal information, while admitting the fact that the data utility is lowered accordingly. This study proposes a new method to perform de-identification by applying the k-anonymity protection model targeting unstructured text in the medical field in which de-identification is mandatory because privacy protection issues are more critical in comparison to other fields. Also, the goal of this study is to propose a new utility metric so that people can comprehend de-identified data set utility intuitively. Therefore, if the result of this research is applied to various industrial fields where unstructured text is used, we expect that we can increase the utility of the unstructured text which contains personal information.