Churn-Jung Liau | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Medical privacy protection based on granular computing.

Based on granular computing methodology, we propose two criteria to quantitatively measure privacy invasion. The total cost criterion measures the effort needed for a data recipient to find private information. The average benefit criterion measures the benefit a data recipient obtains when he received the released data. These two criteria remedy the inadequacy of the deterministic privacy formulation proposed in Proceedings of Asia Pacific Medical Informatics Conference, 2000; Int J Med Inform 2003;71:17-23. Granular computing methodology provides a unified framework for these quantitative measurements and previous bin size and logical approaches. These two new criteria are implemented in a prototype system Cellsecu 2.0. Preliminary system performance evaluation is conducted and reviewed.

Computing Methodologies↗

PubMed2003

Preserving confidentiality when sharing medical database with the Cellsecu system.

We propose a computer system called Cellsecu that maintains the anonymity and the confidentiality of each cell containing sensitive information in medical database. Cellsecu attains this by automatically removing, generalizing, and expanding information. It is designed to enhance data privacy protection so a data warehouse can automatically handle queries. In most cases, health organizations collect medical data with explicit identifiers, such as name, address and phone number. Simply removing all explicit identifiers prior to release of the data is not enough to preserve the data confidentiality. Remaining data can be used to re-identify individuals by linking or matching the data to other database, or by looking at unique characteristics found in the database. A formal model based on Modal logic is the theoretical foundation of Cellsecu. As well, a new confidentiality criteria called "non-uniqueness" is defined and implemented. We believe modeling this problem formally can clarify the issue as well as clearly identify the boundary of current technology. Base on our preliminary performance evaluation, the confidentiality check module and the confidentiality enhancing module only slightly degrade system performance.

Computer Security↗