A de-identifier for medical discharge summaries

摘要

ObjectiveClinical records contain significant medical information that can be useful to researchers in various disciplines. However, these records also contain personal health information (PHI) whose presence limits the use of the records outside of hospitals.The goal of de-identification is to remove all PHI from clinical records. This is a challenging task because many records contain foreign and misspelled PHI; they also contain PHI that are ambiguous with non-PHI. These complications are compounded by the linguistic characteristics of clinical records. For example, medical discharge summaries, which are studied in this paper, are characterized by fragmented, incomplete utterances and domain-specific language; they cannot be fully processed by tools designed for lay language.