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A De-Identification Pipeline for Ultrasound Medical Images in DICOM Format

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
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Abstract

Clinical data sharing between healthcare institutions, and between practitioners is often hindered by privacy protection requirements. This problem is critical in collaborative scenarios where data sharing is fundamental for establishing a workflow among parties. The anonymization of patient information burned in DICOM images requires elaborate processes somewhat more complex than simple de-identification of textual information. Usually, before sharing, there is a need for manual removal of specific areas containing sensitive information in the images. In this paper, we present a pipeline for ultrasound medical image de-identification, provided as a free anonymization REST service for medical image applications, and a Software-as-a-Service to streamline automatic de-identification of medical images, which is freely available for end-users. The proposed approach applies image processing functions and machine-learning models to bring about an automatic system to anonymize medical images. To perform character recognition, we evaluated several machine-learning models, being Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) selected as the best approach. For accessing the system quality, 500 processed images were manually inspected showing an anonymization rate of 89.2%. The tool can be accessed at https://bioinformatics.ua.pt/dicom/anonymizer and it is available with the most recent version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari. A Docker image containing the proposed service is also publicly available for the community.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aveiro, DETI/IEETA, Aveiro, Portugal

    Eriksson Monteiro, Carlos Costa & José Luís Oliveira

Authors
  1. Eriksson Monteiro
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  2. Carlos Costa
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  3. José Luís Oliveira
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Correspondence to Eriksson Monteiro.

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Funding

This work was supported by project Cloud Thinking (CENTRO-07-ST24-FEDER-002031), co-funded by QREN, “Mais Centro” program, and the EU/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking (EMIF grant n° 115,372). Eriksson Monteiro is funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under the grant agreement SFRH/BD/102195/2014.

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All authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest in this work.

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

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Monteiro, E., Costa, C. & Oliveira, J.L. A De-Identification Pipeline for Ultrasound Medical Images in DICOM Format. J Med Syst 41, 89 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0736-1

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