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US 2021/0004489 A1Published application
Systems and methods for de-identifying medical and healthcare data
AssigneeMedicom Technologies Inc.
InventorsMICHAEL ROSENBERG, MALCOLM BENITZ, JASON SUTTLES, CHRIS WOODLIEF, BRENT GOLDSTEIN
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
The invention relates generally to systems and methods for protecting patient privacy when health care information is shared between various entities and, in particular, to systems and methods that implement a multi-stage sanitizing routine for de-identifying patient data from medical reports and diagnostic images to ensure patient privacy, while preserving the ability for sanitized medical reports and diagnostic images to be re-identified.
Claims20
A method for de-identifying medical data, comprising:
- retrieving, by a server, a medical image to be de-identified of patient information;
- determining, by the server, a modality associated with the medical image;
- retrieving, by the server, a de-identification profile for the modality, wherein the de-identification profile specifies at least one area of the medical image that contains patient information;
- applying, by a sanitizing engine coupled to the server, a blackout zone over the area of the medical image specified in the de-identification profile, wherein the patient information within the blackout zone is deleted by the sanitizing engine;
- performing, by the sanitizing engine, an optical character recognition operation in the area after the blackout zone has been applied;
- determining, by the sanitizing engine, if any characters are detected in the area after the blackout zone has been applied;
- detecting, by the sanitizing engine, a boundary for a diagnostic portion of the medical image if no characters are detected in the area after the blackout zone has been applied;
- detecting, by the sanitizing engine, if non-black pixels are present outside of the boundary for the diagnostic portion;
- and
- performing a first operation by the sanitizing engine to convert any non-black pixels detected outside of the boundary for the diagnostic portion to black pixels, or performing a second operation by the sanitizing engine to encapsulate the medical image into a DICOM format if non-black pixels are not detected outside of the boundary for the diagnostic portion.
7 more elements
A method for de-identifying medical data, comprising:
- retrieving, by a server, a medical image to be de-identified of patient information;
- applying, by a sanitizing engine coupled to the server, a sanitizing process in an area of the medical image determined by a previously generated de-identification profile, wherein the de-identification profile specifies the area of the medical image containing patient information, and wherein the sanitizing process deletes the patient information in the area;
- detecting, by the sanitizing engine, if any characters are present in the area after the sanitizing process has been applied;
- detecting, by the sanitizing engine, a gradient boundary for a diagnostic portion of the medical image if no characters are detected in the area after the sanitizing process has been applied;
- and
- converting, by the sanitizing engine, pixels of any characters detected outside of the gradient boundary for the diagnostic portion to an inverse color.
3 more elements
A system for de-identifying medical data, comprising:
- a database configured to store at least one medical record, wherein the medical record includes a medical image and a medical report;
- a sanitizing engine communicatively coupled to the database, the sanitizing engine configured to import the medical record from the database,
- the sanitizing engine further configured to apply a blackout zone in an area of the medical image that contains patient information,
- the sanitizing engine further configured to delete the patient information within the blackout zone,
- the sanitizing engine further configured to detect if characters exist in the area that the blackout zone was applied,
- the sanitizing engine further configured to detect a gradient boundary for a diagnostic portion on the medical image, and
- the sanitizing engine further configured to convert non-white pixels that exist outside of the gradient boundary for the diagnostic portion to white pixels,
- the sanitizing engine further configured to encapsulate the medical image into a DICOM file;
- and
- a server communicatively coupled to the database and the sanitizing engine, the server configured to transmit the DICOM file to a remote computing system.
7 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.