{"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/is-medical-chest-x-ray-data-anonymous","title":"Deep Learning-based Patient Re-identification Is able to Exploit the Biometric Nature of Medical Chest X-ray Data","arxiv_id":"2103.08562","date":"2021-03-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kai Packhäuser","Sebastian Gündel","Nicolas Münster","Christopher Syben","Vincent Christlein","Andreas Maier"],"abstract":"With the rise and ever-increasing potential of deep learning techniques in recent years, publicly available medical datasets became a key factor to enable reproducible development of diagnostic algorithms in the medical domain. Medical data contains sensitive patient-related information and is therefore usually anonymized by removing patient identifiers, e.g., patient names before publication. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show that a well-trained deep learning system is able to recover the patient identity from chest X-ray data. We demonstrate this using the publicly available large-scale ChestX-ray14 dataset, a collection of 112,120 frontal-view chest X-ray images from 30,805 unique patients. Our verification system is able to identify whether two frontal chest X-ray images are from the same person with an AUC of 0.9940 and a classification accuracy of 95.55%. We further highlight that the proposed system is able to reveal the same person even ten and more years after the initial scan. When pursuing a retrieval approach, we observe an mAP@R of 0.9748 and a precision@1 of 0.9963. Furthermore, we achieve an AUC of up to 0.9870 and a precision@1 of up to 0.9444 when evaluating our trained networks on external datasets such as CheXpert and the COVID-19 Image Data Collection. Based on this high identification rate, a potential attacker may leak patient-related information and additionally cross-reference images to obtain more information. Thus, there is a great risk of sensitive content falling into unauthorized hands or being disseminated against the will of the concerned patients. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous chest X-ray datasets have been published to advance research. Therefore, such data may be vulnerable to potential attacks by deep learning-based re-identification algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08562v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.08562v4.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":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"is-medical-chest-x-ray-data-anonymous","repo_url":"https://github.com/kaipackhaeuser/cxr-patient-reid","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diagnostic","task_name":"Diagnostic"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2103.08562","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}