Challenge: Several ethical and scientific issues arise regarding the balance between maintaining patient confidentiality and the need for wider application of trained models.
Approach: They propose to use pseudonymised clinical text as training data to de-identify real clinical text in other hospitals.
Outcome: The proposed model performed better for some PHI information than the standard model and poor performance on Location and Health Care Unit information.

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A Semi-supervised Approach for De-identification of Swedish Clinical Text (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: An abundance of electronic health records (EHRs) is produced every day within healthcare.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised method for automatically creating high-quality training data for de-identification using annotated data for training and annotations that are costly in time and human resources.
Outcome: The proposed method improves recall from 84.75% to 89.20% without sacrificing precision to the same extent, dropping from 95.73% to 94.20%.
Adversarial Learning of Privacy-Preserving Text Representations for De-Identification of Medical Records (P19-1)

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Challenge: De-identification is the task of detecting protected health information (PHI) in medical text.
Approach: They propose to create shareable representations of medical text that contain no PHI and can be shared between organizations to create unified datasets for training de-identification models.
Outcome: The proposed representation allows training a simple LSTM-CRF model to an F1 score of 97.4%.
Data-Constrained Synthesis of Training Data for De-Identification (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: sensitive domains lack widely available datasets due to privacy risks . recent studies have focused on evaluating the privacy of the synthetic text .
Approach: They domain-adapt LLMs to clinical domain and generate synthetic clinical texts . they then generate NER models that can be annotated with tags for PII .
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than the original model using smaller datasets.
Can Synthetic Text Help Clinical Named Entity Recognition? A Study of Electronic Health Records in French (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: In sensitive domains, the sharing of corpora is restricted due to confidentiality, copyrights or trade secrets.
Approach: They use auto-regressive neural models to generate a clinical case corpus annotated with clinical entities and evaluate it for a named entity recognition task.
Outcome: The proposed model can produce clinical case corpus annotated with clinical entities while maintaining confidentiality.
Clinical Text Anonymization, its Influence on Downstream NLP Tasks and the Risk of Re-Identification (2023.eacl-srw)

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Challenge: De-identification and anonymization of clinical data is needed to solve access to clinicaldata.
Approach: They propose to use text anonymization techniques to break the anonymization of clinical data . they propose to apply a re-identification attack to the anonymized text data to break this.
Outcome: The proposed approach can break the anonymization of clinical data, the authors show .
Efficiently and Thoroughly Anonymizing a Transformer Language Model for Dutch Electronic Health Records: a Two-Step Method (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Neural Networks (NNs) are used to model large amounts of data, such as text data, and have shown to be very useful for language modelling.
Approach: They propose to use a Dutch language model for hospital notes to anonymize a model trained on large amounts of data and publish it online.
Outcome: The proposed method predicts a name-like token 0.2% of the time, compared to the original training data.
Generating Synthetic Free-text Medical Records with Low Re-identification Risk using Masked Language Modeling (2025.naacl-srw)

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Challenge: Existing methods to generate medical records using Causal Language Modelling are limited due to privacy concerns.
Approach: They propose a method for generating medical records using Masked Language Modelling using Causal language models.
Outcome: The proposed method produces high-quality synthetic data with a re-identification risk of only 3.5% and a patient recall of 96%.
Not What the Doctor Ordered: Surveying LLM-based De-identification and Quantifying Clinical Information Loss (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: De-identification is an application of NLP where automated algorithms remove identifying information of patients and providers.
Approach: They propose to use generative large language models to de-identify patients and providers . they propose to validate existing metrics to quantify extent of inappropriate removal .
Outcome: The proposed method is based on a survey of LLM-based de-identification research . it shows that the models perform poorly in identifying clinically relevant changes .
MedCATTrainer: A Biomedical Free Text Annotation Interface with Active Learning and Research Use Case Specific Customisation (D19-3)

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Challenge: 80% of biomedical data is stored in unstructured text such as electronic health records (EHRs).
Approach: They propose a web-based interface for building, improving and customising a given Named Entity Recognition and Linking (NER+L) model for biomedical domain text.
Outcome: The proposed interface is designed to build, improve and customise a NER+L model for biomedical domain text and collate accurate research use case specific training data.
Downstream Task Performance of BERT Models Pre-Trained Using Automatically De-Identified Clinical Data (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Automatic de-identification systems introduce errors due to their imperfect precision and may negatively impact the utility of the de-identified dataset.
Approach: They propose to de-identifie a large clinical corpus in Swedish by removing entire sentences containing sensitive data or by replacing sensitive words with realistic surrogates.
Outcome: The proposed models are safe to distribute to other academic researchers and reduce privacy risks.

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