Data Anonymization

HIPAA Regulations require that a patient's privacy is protected.

One way this can be done is by anonymizing the patient data. Analyze 7.5 and NIFTI format files are effectively anonymized if the file names are anonymized, since the header information contains no identifiable subject information.

Most data originating from scanners for the fBIRN project, however, is in DICOM format. A tool for anonymizing DICOM data can be found here

This tool is useful as it can be modified easily to replace or delete certain DICOM tags by editing file dcanon.tcl which is part of this package.

This package uses Dave Clunie's dccp program which is part of the Dicom3tools Software to do a DICOM copy of a source DICOM image to a destination DICOM image.

The default DICOM tags anonymized by this package can be found here

Here is a typical entry in file dcanon.tcl

-r PatientName anon

This line will replace the DICOM Patient name with the string "anon" in the destination DICOM image header.

The -d option can be used to delete a DICOM tag.

In some cases, it may be useful to replace a DICOM tag with information that protects patient privacy and also provides information useful to people who view the data.

Nota bene: This only anonymizes known DICOM tags. Proprietary DICOM tags exist, however, and MAY contain subject identifiers. This needs to be considered in making DICOM format data available to the public.

Contributed by: Mark Anderson, Jessica Turner (July 2007)