The UK Data Protection Act (1998) recognises the rights of data subjects and establishes the conditions for processing personal data.
Even when patients give informed consent to the processing of their personal data it is desirable and good practice that the data are rendered "anonymous".
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the standard for medical imaging exchange and storage.
DICOM images headers have lots of attributes that can potentially contain personal data. To handle this problem in SINAPSE we have developed a DICOM de-identification software, PrivacyGuard. There is a new release 1.3.12 of PrivacyGuard, please visit the project page.
Even when patients give informed consent to the processing of their personal data it is desirable and good practice that the data are rendered "anonymous".
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the standard for medical imaging exchange and storage.
DICOM images headers have lots of attributes that can potentially contain personal data. To handle this problem in SINAPSE we have developed a DICOM de-identification software, PrivacyGuard. There is a new release 1.3.12 of PrivacyGuard, please visit the project page.
Some of its features are:
- XML defined de-identification rules in documents we call Privacy Policies.
- By modifying or creating new Privacy Policies the users can configure the anonymisation rules.
- Extensibility: The process can be further customised by implementing your own anonymisation methods in Java classes that can be then used by PrivacyGuard.
- More operations can be executed like archiving the files (before and/or after anonymisation), sending the anonymised objects using DICOM send or SFTP, etc.
- Supports the DICOM standard Attribute Level Confidentiality (encryption based anonymisation).
- Includes methods to remove information appearing in pixel data.
- Includes several applications:
- Folder Anonymiser: anonymises "DICOM files" under a given directory (recursively).
- Receiver Anonymiser: a DICOM receiver that serializes to disk the objects and then anonymises them.
- Policy Editor: a graphical application to create/edit Privacy Policies.
Input/Output Channels
![[Graphic of input output channels]](/images/input-output-channels.png)
Policy lifecycle
![[Graphic of policy lifecycle]](/images/policy-lifecycle.png)
