Pseudonymization of Medical Images: Development and implementation of a method for the pseudonymized processing of DICOM images

Through the digitalization process in medical healthcare, privacy concerns arose and there is a call for new security improvements. The area of digital imaging is exceptionally challenging because of the high data amount. This book presents a solution for enhancing privacy for images in medical healthcare. After a security evaluation of the DICOM imaging standard, security enhancing technologies (cryptography, anonymization, pseudonymization) are presented. Once alternative technologies have been presented, medical workflows and requirements are evaluated. Combining all results from these evaluations will lead to a decision on the solution architecture. The main focus of this book is on the presentation of a performant DICOM conform pseudonymization prototype, which ensures patient privacy in medical healthcare and is independent from the DICOM client/server architecture. Within this prototype users define access rights for their records and researchers are able to read the depersonificated records. It will be shown that pseudonymization is a good mean to reach features like sharing data sets, high performance, research access and full privacy.