Controlled searching in reversibly de-identified medical imaging archives

Abstract

Nowadays, digital medical imaging in healthcare has become a fundamental tool for medical diagnosis. This growth has been accompanied by the development of technologies and standards, such as the DICOM standard and PACS. This environment led to the creation of collaborative projects where there is a need to share medical data between different institutions for research and educational purposes. In this context, it is necessary to maintain patient data privacy and provide an easy and secure mechanism for authorized personnel access. This paper presents a solution that fully de-identifies standard medical imaging objects, including metadata and pixel data, providing at the same time a reversible de-identifier mechanism that retains search capabilities from the original data. The last feature is important in some scenarios, for instance, in collaborative platforms where data is anonymized when shared with the community but searchable for data custodians or authorized entities. The solution was integrated into an open source PACS archive and validated in a multidisciplinary collaborative scenario.

Keywords: DICOM; De-identification; Medical Imaging; Medical databases indexing; PACS; Pseudonymisation.