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A Method for Efficient De-identification of DICOM Metadata and Burned-in Pixel Text.

Publication ,  Journal Article
Macdonald, JA; Morgan, KR; Konkel, B; Abdullah, K; Martin, M; Ennis, C; Lo, JY; Stroo, M; Snyder, DC; Bashir, MR
Published in: J Imaging Inform Med
April 8, 2024

De-identification of DICOM images is an essential component of medical image research. While many established methods exist for the safe removal of protected health information (PHI) in DICOM metadata, approaches for the removal of PHI "burned-in" to image pixel data are typically manual, and automated high-throughput approaches are not well validated. Emerging optical character recognition (OCR) models can potentially detect and remove PHI-bearing text from medical images but are very time-consuming to run on the high volume of images found in typical research studies. We present a data processing method that performs metadata de-identification for all images combined with a targeted approach to only apply OCR to images with a high likelihood of burned-in text. The method was validated on a dataset of 415,182 images across ten modalities representative of the de-identification requests submitted at our institution over a 20-year span. Of the 12,578 images in this dataset with burned-in text of any kind, only 10 passed undetected with the method. OCR was only required for 6050 images (1.5% of the dataset).

Duke Scholars

Published In

J Imaging Inform Med

DOI

EISSN

2948-2933

Publication Date

April 8, 2024

Location

Switzerland
 

Citation

APA
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Macdonald, J. A., Morgan, K. R., Konkel, B., Abdullah, K., Martin, M., Ennis, C., … Bashir, M. R. (2024). A Method for Efficient De-identification of DICOM Metadata and Burned-in Pixel Text. J Imaging Inform Med. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-024-01098-7
Macdonald, Jacob A., Katelyn R. Morgan, Brandon Konkel, Kulsoom Abdullah, Mark Martin, Cory Ennis, Joseph Y. Lo, Marissa Stroo, Denise C. Snyder, and Mustafa R. Bashir. “A Method for Efficient De-identification of DICOM Metadata and Burned-in Pixel Text.J Imaging Inform Med, April 8, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-024-01098-7.
Macdonald JA, Morgan KR, Konkel B, Abdullah K, Martin M, Ennis C, et al. A Method for Efficient De-identification of DICOM Metadata and Burned-in Pixel Text. J Imaging Inform Med. 2024 Apr 8;
Macdonald, Jacob A., et al. “A Method for Efficient De-identification of DICOM Metadata and Burned-in Pixel Text.J Imaging Inform Med, Apr. 2024. Pubmed, doi:10.1007/s10278-024-01098-7.
Macdonald JA, Morgan KR, Konkel B, Abdullah K, Martin M, Ennis C, Lo JY, Stroo M, Snyder DC, Bashir MR. A Method for Efficient De-identification of DICOM Metadata and Burned-in Pixel Text. J Imaging Inform Med. 2024 Apr 8;

Published In

J Imaging Inform Med

DOI

EISSN

2948-2933

Publication Date

April 8, 2024

Location

Switzerland