Adversarial Learning of Privacy-Preserving Text Representations for De-Identification of Medical Records

Max Friedrich, Arne Köhn, Gregor Wiedemann, Chris Biemann


Abstract
De-identification is the task of detecting protected health information (PHI) in medical text. It is a critical step in sanitizing electronic health records (EHR) to be shared for research. Automatic de-identification classifiers can significantly speed up the sanitization process. However, obtaining a large and diverse dataset to train such a classifier that works well across many types of medical text poses a challenge as privacy laws prohibit the sharing of raw medical records. We introduce a method to create privacy-preserving shareable representations of medical text (i.e. they contain no PHI) that does not require expensive manual pseudonymization. These representations can be shared between organizations to create unified datasets for training de-identification models. Our representation allows training a simple LSTM-CRF de-identification model to an F1 score of 97.4%, which is comparable to a strong baseline that exposes private information in its representation. A robust, widely available de-identification classifier based on our representation could potentially enable studies for which de-identification would otherwise be too costly.
Anthology ID:
P19-1584
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5829–5839
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1584
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1584
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Max Friedrich, Arne Köhn, Gregor Wiedemann, and Chris Biemann. 2019. Adversarial Learning of Privacy-Preserving Text Representations for De-Identification of Medical Records. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5829–5839, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adversarial Learning of Privacy-Preserving Text Representations for De-Identification of Medical Records (Friedrich et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1584.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1584.mp4
Code
 maxfriedrich/deid-training-data