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Development and Application of Data Privacy Protection in Healthcare

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Computing and Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2024) | Viewed by 1167

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Engineering and Information Technology Institute of Medical Informatics, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Höheweg 80, 2502 Biel, Switzerland
Interests: medical informatics; data privacy and protection; data science

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Guest Editor
School of Business, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, 4600 Olten, Switzerland
Interests: computational statistics; official statistics; compositional data analysis; robust statistics; statistical modelling
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Implementing advanced data security measures is indispensable in various industries, among which healthcare occupies a major position because it utilizes highly sensitive patient information. With the popularization of smart and digital medical devices, such data is being collected in an exponentially accelerated manner. Among others, patient-related data in the healthcare setting includes clinical information, medical images, genetic data, behavior records, social information, etc. Protecting this kind of data is important in treatment as well as research contexts. In the former case, trust is secured and even increased, allowing an increase in the range of data types patients are willing to provide for efficient treatment. In the latter case, secondary data analysis is facilitated, which allows the furthering of knowledge without costly clinical studies and the creation of new, personalized services.

There have been significant developments in data privacy protection in healthcare in recent years. 1) Encryption and secure storage: healthcare organizations now employ robust encryption techniques to protect patient data, both during transmission and storage. 2) Access control and user authentication: strict access controls are implemented to ensure that only authorized individuals can access patient data. 3) Audit trails and monitoring: healthcare systems employ monitoring tools and audit trails to track access to patient data. 4) Anonymization: in order to mitigate the legal and ethical risks of sharing sensitive information for secondary data usage scenarios, de-identification of patient records is commonly used and is now related to sophisticated notions such as differential privacy. Despite these measures, the healthcare system remains an important target for cyber attackers, with hospitals in several countries hacked, resulting in a large amount of information being leaked. Faced with such risks, data privacy and security protection have to be adapted to match the improved attacker resources.

This Special Issue aims to promote advanced technologies and applications of data privacy protection schemes in healthcare systems. We welcome high-quality submissions that demonstrate insights and experiences on healthcare data protection in this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Murat Sariyar
Prof. Dr. Matthias Templ
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • data protection in healthcare
  • cryptography in healthcare
  • data privacy protection
  • data leakage
  • big data

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

13 pages, 528 KiB  
Article
Challenges of Using Synthetic Data Generation Methods for Tabular Microdata
by Marko Miletic and Murat Sariyar
Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(14), 5975; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14145975 - 9 Jul 2024
Viewed by 852
Abstract
The generation of synthetic data holds significant promise for augmenting limited datasets while avoiding privacy issues, facilitating research, and enhancing machine learning models’ robustness. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) stand out as promising tools, employing two neural networks—generator and discriminator—to produce synthetic data that [...] Read more.
The generation of synthetic data holds significant promise for augmenting limited datasets while avoiding privacy issues, facilitating research, and enhancing machine learning models’ robustness. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) stand out as promising tools, employing two neural networks—generator and discriminator—to produce synthetic data that mirrors real data distributions. This study evaluates GAN variants (CTGAN, CopulaGAN), a variational autoencoder, and copulas on diverse real datasets of different complexity encompassing numerical and categorical attributes. The results highlight CTGAN’s sensitivity to training parameters and TVAE’s robustness across datasets. Scalability challenges persist, with GANs demanding substantial computational resources. TVAE stands out for its high utility across all datasets, even for high-dimensional data, though it incurs higher privacy risks, which is indicative of the curse of dimensionality. While no single model universally excels, understanding the trade-offs and leveraging model strengths can significantly enhance synthetic data generation (SDG). Future research should focus on adaptive learning mechanisms, scalability enhancements, and standardized evaluation metrics to advance SDG methods effectively. Addressing these challenges will foster broader adoption and application of synthetic data. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Development and Application of Data Privacy Protection in Healthcare)
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