Automated anonymization of radiology reports: comparison of publicly available natural language processing and large language models.

Journal: European radiology
PMID:

Abstract

PURPOSE: Medical reports, governed by HIPAA regulations, contain personal health information (PHI), restricting secondary data use. Utilizing natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLM), we sought to employ publicly available methods to automatically anonymize PHI in free-text radiology reports.

Authors

  • Marcel C Langenbach
    Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. mlangenbach@mgh.harvard.edu.
  • Borek Foldyna
    From the MTA-SE Cardiovascular Imaging Research Group, Heart and Vascular Center, Semmelweis University, 68 Varosmajor St, 1122 Budapest, Hungary (M.K., J.K., B.M., P.M.H.); Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass (J.K., Y.K., A.I., M.T.L., B.F., H.J.A., U.H.); Center for Cause of Death Investigation, Faculty of Medicine, Hokkaido University, Hokkaido, Japan (Y.K.); Department for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Medical Center-University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (C.L.S.); and Department of Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass (H.J.A.).
  • Ibrahim Hadzic
    Maastricht University Medical Centre, Netherlands.
  • Isabel L Langenbach
    Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
  • Vineet K Raghu
    Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
  • Michael T Lu
    Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston.
  • Tomas G Neilan
    Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
  • Julius C Heemelaar
    Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.