Medical Image De-Identification Benchmark Challenge

The de-identification (deID) of protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) is a fundamental requirement for sharing medical images, particularly through public repositories, to ensure compliance with patient privacy laws. In addition, preservation of non-PHI metadata to inform and enable downstream development of imaging artificial intelligence (AI) is an important consideration in biomedical research. The goal of MIDI-B was to provide a standardized platform for benchmarking of DICOM image deID tools based on a set of rules conformant to the HIPAA Safe Harbor regulation, the DICOM Attribute Confidentiality Profiles, and best practices in preservation of research-critical metadata, as defined by The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). The challenge employed a large, diverse, multi-center, and multi-modality set of real de-identified radiology images with synthetic PHI/PII inserted. The MIDI-B Challenge consisted of three phases: training, validation, and test. Eighty individuals registered for the challenge. In the training phase, we encouraged participants to tune their algorithms using their in-house or public data. The validation and test phases utilized the DICOM images containing synthetic identifiers (of 216 and 322 subjects, respectively). Ten teams successfully completed the test phase of the challenge. To measure success of a rule-based approach to image deID, scores were computed as the percentage of correct actions from the total number of required actions. The scores ranged from 97.91% to 99.93%. Participants employed a variety of open-source and proprietary tools with customized configurations, large language models, and optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper we provide a comprehensive report on the MIDI-B Challenge's design, implementation, results, and lessons learned.

Image deidentification in the XNAT ecosystem: use cases and solutions

XNAT is a server-based data management platform widely used in academia for curating large databases of DICOM images for research projects. We describe in detail a deidentification workflow for DICOM data using facilities in XNAT, together with independent tools in the XNAT "ecosystem". We list different contexts in which deidentification might be needed, based on our prior experience. The starting point for participation in the Medical Image De-Identification Benchmark (MIDI-B) challenge was a set of pre-existing local methodologies, which were adapted during the validation phase of the challenge. Our result in the test phase was 97.91\%, considerably lower than our peers, due largely to an arcane technical incompatibility of our methodology with the challenge's Synapse platform, which prevented us receiving feedback during the validation phase. Post-submission, additional discrepancy reports from the organisers and via the MIDI-B Continuous Benchmarking facility, enabled us to improve this score significantly to 99.61\%. An entirely rule-based approach was shown to be capable of removing all name-related information in the test corpus, but exhibited failures in dealing fully with address data. Initial experiments using published machine-learning models to remove addresses were partially successful but showed the models to be "over-aggressive" on other types of free-text data, leading to a slight overall degradation in performance to 99.54\%. Future development will therefore focus on improving address-recognition capabilities, but also on better removal of identifiable data burned into the image pixels. Several technical aspects relating to the "answer key" are still under discussion with the challenge organisers, but we estimate that our percentage of genuine deidentification failures on the MIDI-B test corpus currently stands at 0.19\%. (Abridged from original for arXiv submission)