# Beyond De-Identification: A Structured Approach for Defining and Detecting Indirect Identifiers in Medical Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13342 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13342/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03714/) (2023)
- [The Text Anonymization Benchmark (TAB): A Dedicated Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Text Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00443/) (2022)
- [Automatic end-to-end De-identification: Is high accuracy the only metric?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10583/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Introducing the Privacy-HSD Trade-off: Hate Speech Detection, but not at the Cost of Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19006/) (2026)
- [DP-IPI: A Hybrid Differential Privacy Text Rewriting Mechanism for Indirect Personal Identifiers in Clinical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29684/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sharing sensitive texts for scientific purposes requires appropriate techniques to protect the privacy of patients and healthcare personnel. Anonymizing textual data is particularly challenging due to the presence of diverse unstructured direct and indirect identifiers. To mitigate the risk of re-identification, this work introduces a schema of nine categories of indirect identifiers designed to account for different potential adversaries, including acquaintances, family members and medical staff. Using this schema, we annotate 100 MIMIC-III discharge summaries and propose baseline models for identifying indirect identifiers. We will release the annotation guidelines, annotation spans (6,199 annotations in total) and the corresponding MIMIC-III document IDs to support further research in this area.