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.

Anonymization of clinical text is crucial to allow the sharing and disclosure of health records while safeguarding patient privacy. However, automated anonymization processes are still highly limited in healthcare practice, as these systems cannot assure the anonymization of all private information. This paper explores the application of a novel technique that guarantees the removal of all sensitive information through the usage of text embeddings obtained from a de-identified dataset, replacing every word or sentence of a clinical note. We analyze the performance of different embedding techniques and models by evaluating them using recently proposed evaluation metrics. The results demonstrate that sentence replacement is better at keeping relevant medical information untouched, while the word replacement strategy performs better in terms of anonymization sensitivity.

Automated text anonymization is a classical problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The topic has evolved immensely throughout the years, with the first list-search and rule-based solutions evolving to statistical modeling approaches and later to advanced systems that rely on powerful state-of-the-art language models. Even so, these solutions fail to be widely implemented in the most privacy-demanding areas of activity, such as healthcare; none of them is perfect, and most can not guarantee rigorous anonymization. This paper presents INCOGNITUS, a flexible platform for the automated anonymization of clinical notes that offers the possibility of applying different techniques. The available tools include an underexplored yet promising method that guarantees 100% recall by replacing each word with a semantically identical one. In addition, the presented framework incorporates a performance evaluation module to compute a novel metric for information loss assessment in real-time.