Securing personal information for medical AI

This work is supported by JST, CREST Grant Number JPMJCR21M2 (PI: Prof. Kenjiro Taura), Japan. 

Diagnostic radiologists need artificial intelligence (AI) for medical imaging, but access to medical images required for training in AI has become increasingly restrictive. To release and use medical images, we need an algorithm that can simultaneously protect privacy and preserve pathologies in medical images. To develop such an algorithm, here, we propose DP-GLOW, a hybrid of a local differential privacy (LDP) algorithm and one of the flow-based deep generative models (GLOW). By applying a GLOW model, we disentangle the pixelwise correlation of images, which makes it difficult to protect privacy with straightforward LDP algorithms for images. Specifically, we map images onto the latent vector of the GLOW model, each element of which follows an independent normal distribution, and we apply the Laplace mechanism to the latent vector. Moreover, we applied DP-GLOW to chest X-ray images to generate LDP images while preserving pathologies. (H. Shibata et al., 2023, Journal Paper Available from Applied Sciences)