arXiv Computation and Language By Stig Hellemans, Tom Stroobants, Elyne Scheurwegs, Pieter Meysman, Philippe G. Jorens, Kris Laukens

MedDeID enables locally governed clinical-text de-identification from real or synthetic training data

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MedDeID is an on‑premises framework that combines in‑house annotation, synthetic‑note generation, model training, inference, pseudonymisation and evaluation to de‑identify clinical text. On a Dutch hospital benchmark, a hospital‑trained transformer detected 98.9 % of identifying text while redacting only 0.24 % of non‑identifier text; a synthetic‑only model achieved 96.1 %. In primary‑care notes, the synthetic‑trained model outperformed the hospital‑trained model in recall and robustness to identifier‑format changes, and an English version trained without real text reached 99.7 % and 98.9 % detection on synthetic benchmarks.

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arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Clinically Grounded Privacy Evaluation of Medical LMs

The paper introduces a clinically grounded privacy evaluation framework for medical language models, assessing leakage across a spectrum of adversarial access levels—from publicly inferable demographics to leaked note fragments. Using this framework on an LM pretrained on 378,000 clinical notes, the authors find that routine encounter metadata leads to high verbatim memorization and significant recovery of sensitive diagnoses (e.g., AUROC 0.91 for abortion, 0.82 for HIV). They also note that exact-match memorization can overstate disclosure, with 36% of memorized tokens being templated documentation, underscoring the risks of training on longitudinal clinical data and offering a reusable evaluation tool.

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