Adversarial Privacy Preservation in MRI Scans of the Brain

Lennart Alexander Van der Goten, Tobias Hepp, Zeynep Akata, Kevin Smith

Keywords: medical imaging, generative modeling, privacy, de-identification

Abstract: De-identification of magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) is intrinsically difficult since, even with all metadata removed, a person's face can easily be rendered and matched against a database. Existing de-identification methods tackle this task by obfuscating or removing parts of the face, but they either fail to reliably hide the patient's identity or they remove so much information that they adversely affect further analyses in the 3D space surrounding the face. In this work, we describe a new class of MRI de-identification techniques that remodel privacy-sensitive facial features as opposed to removing them.To accomplish this, we propose a conditional, multi-scale, 3D GAN architecture that takes a patient's MRI scan as input and generates a 3D volume in which the brain is not modified but the face has been de-identified. Compared to the classical removal-based techniques, our deep learning framework preserves privacy more reliably without adversely affecting downstream medical analyses on the brain, including segmentation and age prediction.

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