结构化替换可保留病历信息可检测性,验证了其在多检测器下的等效性。
Surrogate Substitution Preserves PHI Detectability: A Multi-Detector Equivalence Study
- 设计配对多检测器评估协议,聚焦掩码片段的检测能力
- 11个检测器在7种语言中召回率仅下降1.2个百分点,等效性显著
- 揭示生成缺陷与检测器固有局限的差异,适合医疗数据脱敏研究者
保持结构的去标识化通过用真实同类型替代词(如“Anna S.”变为“Maria S.”)替换受保护健康信息(PHI),使临床文本保持流畅且下游工具仍可运行。但前提是替换不破坏下游工具依赖的信号。本文提出一个可测试的焦点问题:在去标识器实际掩码的片段上,下游检测器是否仍能识别出替代词?我们引入配对多检测器评估协议:(i) 仅在掩码片段上评估实用性,解耦覆盖率与实用性;(ii) 使用等效性检验(TOST)而非零假设显著性检验,在5.7万对掩码片段样本下更有效;(iii) 构建替代失败分类体系,区分可修复的生成缺陷与内在检测器限制。在11个检测器、7个基准、7种语言(1750份文档)中,掩码片段召回率从76.1%降至74.9%,等效性检验显示该变化在±2个百分点内无显著差异(p ~ 3e-9),检测器排序保持不变。残余损失主要源于错误生成的替代词(如芝加哥→伊利诺伊、西达斯-西奈→维丹特),非检测器性能下降。红笔底限与开源替代基线表明该效应是良好生成的固有特性,非单一工具所致。我们开放评估子集、评分代码与交互式仪表板(https://custodianai.pages.dev),支持对任意结构化变换进行审计。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Structure-preserving de-identification replaces protected health information (PHI) with realistic same-type surrogates -- "Anna S." becomes "Maria S.", not [NAME] -- so that clinical text stays fluent and downstream tools keep working. But this only helps if the substitution does not itself corrupt the signal those tools rely on. We ask a narrow, testable question: on the spans a de-identifier actually masks, can downstream PHI detectors still find the surrogate? We introduce a paired, multi-detector evaluation protocol that (i) scores utility only on masked spans, decoupling coverage from utility; (ii) uses equivalence testing (TOST) rather than null-hypothesis significance testing, which is uninformative at our sample size (57k paired spans); and (iii) builds a surrogate-failure typology separating fixable generator defects from intrinsic detector limits. Across 11 detectors, 7 benchmarks, and 7 languages (1,750 documents), recall on masked spans moves from 76.1% to 74.9% -- a change our equivalence test shows is statistically equivalent to zero within a +/-2-point margin (p ~ 3e-9), with detector ranking preserved. The residual loss does not reflect detectors getting worse at PHI: it concentrates in malformed and out-of-distribution surrogates (truncation Chicago -> Illino, salience loss Cedars-Sinai -> Vidant). A redaction floor and an open-source surrogate baseline indicate the effect is a property of well-formed substitution, not of one tool. We release the evaluation subsets, scoring code, and an interactive dashboard at https://custodianai.pages.dev so the protocol can audit any structure-preserving transform.
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