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Main Authors: Belkadi, Samuel, Ren, Libo, Micheletti, Nicolo, Han, Lifeng, Nenadic, Goran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09831
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author Belkadi, Samuel
Ren, Libo
Micheletti, Nicolo
Han, Lifeng
Nenadic, Goran
author_facet Belkadi, Samuel
Ren, Libo
Micheletti, Nicolo
Han, Lifeng
Nenadic, Goran
contents The vast amount of available medical records has the potential to improve healthcare and biomedical research. However, privacy restrictions make these data accessible for internal use only. Recent works have addressed this problem by generating synthetic data using Causal Language Modeling. Unfortunately, by taking this approach, it is often impossible to guarantee patient privacy while offering the ability to control the diversity of generations without increasing the cost of generating such data. In contrast, we present a system for generating synthetic free-text medical records using Masked Language Modeling. The system preserves critical medical information while introducing diversity in the generations and minimising re-identification risk. The system's size is about 120M parameters, minimising inference cost. The results demonstrate high-quality synthetic data with a HIPAA-compliant PHI recall rate of 96% and a re-identification risk of 3.5%. Moreover, downstream evaluations show that the generated data can effectively train a model with performance comparable to real data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_09831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generating Synthetic Free-text Medical Records with Low Re-identification Risk using Masked Language Modeling
Belkadi, Samuel
Ren, Libo
Micheletti, Nicolo
Han, Lifeng
Nenadic, Goran
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The vast amount of available medical records has the potential to improve healthcare and biomedical research. However, privacy restrictions make these data accessible for internal use only. Recent works have addressed this problem by generating synthetic data using Causal Language Modeling. Unfortunately, by taking this approach, it is often impossible to guarantee patient privacy while offering the ability to control the diversity of generations without increasing the cost of generating such data. In contrast, we present a system for generating synthetic free-text medical records using Masked Language Modeling. The system preserves critical medical information while introducing diversity in the generations and minimising re-identification risk. The system's size is about 120M parameters, minimising inference cost. The results demonstrate high-quality synthetic data with a HIPAA-compliant PHI recall rate of 96% and a re-identification risk of 3.5%. Moreover, downstream evaluations show that the generated data can effectively train a model with performance comparable to real data.
title Generating Synthetic Free-text Medical Records with Low Re-identification Risk using Masked Language Modeling
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09831