Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39845288›Full record

ArticleJAMIA open2025

pyDeid: an improved, fast, flexible, and generalizable rule-based approach for deidentification of free-text medical records.

Vaakesan Sundrelingam, Shireen Parimoo, Frances Pogacar, Radha Koppula, Saeha Shin, Chloe Pou-Prom, Surain B Roberts, Amol A Verma, Fahad Razak

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in JAMIA open, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of data quality assurance in a multicenter clinical dataset.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2025
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

9 authors.

Vaakesan SundrelingamLi Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.
Shireen ParimooCentre for Computational Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON M5G 0A4, Canada.
Frances PogacarMAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.
Radha KoppulaLi Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.
Saeha ShinLi Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.
Chloe Pou-PromData Science and Advanced Analytics, Unity Health Toronto, Toronto, ON M5C 2T2, Canada.
Surain B RobertsLi Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8792-2240
Amol A VermaLi Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6857-931X
Fahad RazakLi Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St Michael's Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Objectives: Deidentification of personally identifiable information in free-text clinical data is fundamental to making these data broadly available for research. However, there exist gaps in the deidentification landscape with regard to the functionality and flexibility of extant tools, as well as suboptimal tradeoffs between deidentification accuracy and speed. To address these gaps and tradeoffs, we develop a new Python-based deidentification software, pyDeid. Materials and Methods: pyDeid uses a combination of regular expression-based rules, fixed exclusion lists and inclusion lists to deidentify free-text data. Additional configurations of pyDeid include optional named entity recognition and custom name lists. We measure its deidentification performance and speed on 700 admission notes from a Canadian hospital, the publicly available n2c2 benchmark dataset of American discharge notes, as well as a synthetic dataset of artificial intelligence (AI) generated admission notes. We also compare its performance with the Physionet De-identification Software and the popular open-source Philter tool. Results: Different configurations of pyDeid outperformed other tools on various metrics, with a "best" accuracy value of 0.988, best precision of 0.889, best recall of 0.950, and best F1 score of 0.904. All configurations of pyDeid were significantly faster than Philter and Physionet De-identification Software, with the fastest deidentification speed of 0.48 s per note. Discussion and Conclusions: pyDeid allows the flexibility to prioritize between performance and speed, as well as precision and recall, while addressing some of the gaps in functionality left by other tools. pyDeid is also generalizable to domains outside of clinical data and can be further customized for specific contexts or for particular workflows.

Indexed as

deidentificationpersonal health informationprivacysoftware validation

Identifiers

PMID39845288
PMCPMC11752853

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.