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.
By Sasha Ronaghi, Sana Tonekaboni, Lena Stempfle, Vivian Utti, Jordan Li Cahoon, Nathaniel Hendrix, Ayin Vala, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Emily Alsentzer
arXiv:2606. 26879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic data is increasingly used to enable the development and evaluation of AI systems in domains where access to real-world data is restricted.
By William Poulett
Synthetic data is increasingly used to enable the development and evaluation of AI systems in domains where access to real-world data is restricted. In healthcare, clinical documentation presents particular challenges due to its sensitivity.
DP-IPI introduces a hybrid differential privacy text rewriting mechanism that selectively privatizes only the spans containing indirect personal identifiers (IPIs) in clinical texts. By targeting these specific tokens rather than all words, the method preserves higher text quality and usability while still reducing re-identification risks. The approach demonstrates improved privacy‑utility trade‑offs compared to indiscriminate DP text rewriting techniques.
By Ibrahim Baroud, Stephen Meisenbacher, Sebastian M\"oller, Florian Matthes, Roland Roller
arXiv:2608.23248v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Traditional clinical prediction models rely on task-specific pipelines and curated, structured data, which scale poorly and underutilize unstructured...
By Siri Willems, James Butterworth, Lore Goetschalckx, Peter Vrancx, Philippe Modard, Elke Giets, Ludovic Denoyer
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.
By Stig Hellemans, Tom Stroobants, Elyne Scheurwegs, Pieter Meysman, Philippe G. Jorens, Kris Laukens