Unlocking the Potential of Large Language Models for Clinical Text Anonymization: A Comparative Study

David Pissarra, Isabel Curioso, João Alveira, Duarte Pereira, Bruno Ribeiro, Tomás Souper, Vasco Gomes, André Carreiro, Vitor Rolla


Abstract
Automated clinical text anonymization has the potential to unlock the widespread sharing of textual health data for secondary usage while assuring patient privacy. Despite the proposal of many complex and theoretically successful anonymization solutions in literature, these techniques remain flawed. As such, clinical institutions are still reluctant to apply them for open access to their data. Recent advances in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) pose a promising opportunity to further the field, given their capability to perform various tasks. This paper proposes six new evaluation metrics tailored to the challenges of generative anonymization with LLMs. Moreover, we present a comparative study of LLM-based methods, testing them against two baseline techniques. Our results establish LLM-based models as a reliable alternative to common approaches, paving the way toward trustworthy anonymization of clinical text.
Anthology ID:
2024.privatenlp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Ivan Habernal, Sepideh Ghanavati, Abhilasha Ravichander, Vijayanta Jain, Patricia Thaine, Timour Igamberdiev, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Oluwaseyi Feyisetan
Venues:
PrivateNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
74–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.privatenlp-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Pissarra, Isabel Curioso, João Alveira, Duarte Pereira, Bruno Ribeiro, Tomás Souper, Vasco Gomes, André Carreiro, and Vitor Rolla. 2024. Unlocking the Potential of Large Language Models for Clinical Text Anonymization: A Comparative Study. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing, pages 74–84, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unlocking the Potential of Large Language Models for Clinical Text Anonymization: A Comparative Study (Pissarra et al., PrivateNLP-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.privatenlp-1.8.pdf