Overview

The amount of sensitive medically relevant data recorded both in healthcare and by smart devices is growing rapidly and must be handled with care. At the same time, AI and big data methods enable the efficient processing of this data, thus enabling new individualized precision medicine and long-term observations of the effects of medications, therapies and behaviors. But how can the anonymity of the patients behind this data volume be preserved?

As a catalyst for anonymization research for medical applications, the AnoMed
Cluster both anonymization researchers the challenges of medical applications
and show medical users the dangers of deanonymization and the possibilities of the latest anonymization techniques.

Goals

AnoMed Cluster will research new, provably secure and useful anonymization solutions for medical applications and a benchmarking platform will be set up for the international research community, which will enable researchers to upload their anonymization solutions and have them put through their paces.

The platform provides the basis for the evaluation of various anonymization metrics. It will provide interfaces for medical researchers and companies to enter gold standards, define metrics and store data securely. A set of medical application scenarios will be built on which stakeholders can interact with medical data and the latest results of anonymization research, both protection mechanisms and attacks.

Technology transfer should be supported by concrete attacks on medical challenges and a comprehensive
Science communication campaign should be accelerated. This will make it clear to companies, doctors and citizens what the dangers are, and it will become clear that modern anonymization processes provide effective protection against these dangers.

In addition to building an infrastructure, one of the main focuses of
AnoMed is working with a number of experts from IT security, medicine, AI research and industry to develop novel anonymization methods for the competition tasks.

An important building block for accelerating technology transfer, raising user awareness and evaluating new anonymization concepts is the continuous search for vulnerabilities. This includes the development of deanonymization attacks. The AnoMed cluster is developing precisely such attacks.

In order to understand the legal relevance of the submitted and self-developed solutions, legal issues will also be examined directly within the framework of AnoMed. This includes the analysis and interpretation of the GDPR provisions on identifiability, anonymity and pseudonymity of data as a basis for ongoing discussions at national level and data protection through technology design.

The cluster ensures that the potential for innovation and new treatment methods enabled by reliable anonymization techniques is brought to medicine and the medical technology industry, thus promoting health and economic growth in Germany and the EEA.

Project partners