{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/bratsynthetic-text-de-identification-using-a","title":"BRATsynthetic: Text De-identification using a Markov Chain Replacement Strategy for Surrogate Personal Identifying Information","arxiv_id":"2210.16125","date":"2022-10-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["John D. Osborne","Tobias O'Leary","Akhil Nadimpalli","Salma M. Aly.","Richard E. Kennedy"],"abstract":"Objective: Implement and assess personal health identifying information (PHI) substitution strategies and quantify their privacy preserving benefits. Materials and Methods: We implement and assess 3 different `Hiding in Plain Sight` (HIPS) strategies for PHI replacement including a standard Consistent replacement strategy, a Random replacement strategy and a novel Markov model-based strategy. We evaluate the privacy preserving benefits of these strategies on a synthetic PHI distribution and real clinical corpora from 2 different institutions using a range of false negative error rates (FNER). Results: Using FNER ranging from 0.1% to 5% PHI leakage at the document level could be reduced from 27.1% to 0.1% (0.1% FNER) and from 94.2% to 57.7% (5% FNER) utilizing the Markov chain strategy versus the Consistent strategy on a corpus containing a diverse set of notes from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). The Markov chain substitution strategy also consistently outperformed the Consistent and Random substitution strategies in a MIMIC corpus of discharge summaries and on a range of synthetic clinical PHI distributions. Discussion: We demonstrate that a Markov chain surrogate generation strategy substantially reduces the chance of inadvertent PHI release across a range of assumed PHI FNER and release our implementation `BRATsynthetic` on Github. Conclusion: The Markov chain replacement strategy allows for the release of larger de-identified corpora at the same risk level relative to corpora released using a consistent HIPS strategy.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16125v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.16125v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"bratsynthetic-text-de-identification-using-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/uabnlp/bratsynthetic","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}