DataSifterText: Partially Synthetic Text Generation for Sensitive Clinical Notes.

Petabytes of health data are collected annually across the globe in electronic health records (EHR), including significant information stored as unstructured free text. However, the lack of effective mechanisms to securely share clinical text has inhibited its full utilization. We propose a new meth...

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Published in:Journal of Medical Systems Vol. 46; no. 12; pp. 1 - 15
Main Authors: Zhou, Nina, Wu, Qiucheng, Wu, Zewen, Marino, Simeone, Dinov, Ivo D.
Format: equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Springer Nature Dec2022
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Dec2022
      vid: 46
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      pub: Springer Nature
      place: New York, New York
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        10.1007/s10916-022-01880-6
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        atl: DataSifterText: Partially Synthetic Text Generation for Sensitive Clinical Notes.
      aug:
        au:
          Zhou, Nina
          Wu, Qiucheng
          Wu, Zewen
          Marino, Simeone
          Dinov, Ivo D.
        affil: Statistics Online Computational Resource, Health Behavior and Biological, and Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
      sug:
        subj:
          Data Management Methods
          Databases, Health
          Electronic Data Interchange
          Data Mining
          Data Collection, Computer Assisted
          Human
          Data Science
          Artificial Intelligence
          Machine Learning
          Algorithms
          Sample Size
          Data Security
          Privacy and Confidentiality
          Probability
          Quality Assessment
          Data Analytics
          Descriptive Statistics
          Funding Source
      ab: Petabytes of health data are collected annually across the globe in electronic health records (EHR), including significant information stored as unstructured free text. However, the lack of effective mechanisms to securely share clinical text has inhibited its full utilization. We propose a new method, DataSifterText, to generate partially synthetic clinical free-text that can be safely shared between stakeholders (e.g., clinicians, STEM researchers, engineers, analysts, and healthcare providers), limiting the re-identification risk while providing significantly better utility preservation than suppressing or generalizing sensitive tokens. The method creates partially synthetic free-text data, which inherits the joint population distribution of the original data, and disguises the location of true and obfuscated words. Under certain obfuscation levels, the resulting synthetic text was sufficiently altered with different choices, orders, and frequencies of words compared to the original records. The differences were comparable to machine-generated (fully synthetic) text reported in previous studies. We applied DataSifterText to two medical case studies. In the CDC work injury application, using privacy protection, 60.9-86.5% of the synthetic descriptions belong to the same cluster as the original descriptions, demonstrating better utility preservation than the naïve content suppressing method (45.8-85.7%). In the MIMIC III application, the generated synthetic data maintained over 80% of the original information regarding patients' overall health conditions. The reported DataSifterText statistical obfuscation results indicate that the technique provides sufficient privacy protection (low identification risk) while preserving population-level information (high utility).
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        equations & formulas
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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