# MedDeID enables locally governed clinical-text de-identification from real or synthetic training data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Comparing Rule-based, Feature-based and Deep Neural Methods for De-identification of Dutch Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05714/) (2020)
- [Not What the Doctor Ordered: Surveying LLM-based De-identification and Quantifying Clinical Information Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14464/) (2025)
- [SHIELD: A Diverse Clinical Note Dataset and Distilled Small Language Models for Enterprise-Scale De-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03301/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Clinical notes contain personally identifiable information (PII), restricting reuse for research and medical AI, especially when data cannot leave an institution. We developed MedDeID, an on-premises framework combining in-house annotation and synthetic-note generation with model training, inference, pseudonymisation and evaluation. On an independently annotated, adjudicated 300-note Dutch hospital benchmark, a hospital-trained compact transformer detected 98.9% of identifying text while redacting 0.24% of text outside annotated identifiers; a synthetic-only counterpart detected 96.1%. On 100 primary-care notes, the synthetic-trained model achieved higher recall than the hospital-trained model (90.3% versus 87.0%) and greater robustness to identifier-format perturbations. An English instantiation trained without real text detected 99.7% and 98.9% of annotated identifier characters on two external synthetic benchmarks. These results demonstrate transfer of the workflow to another language, but not clinical English performance. MedDeID provides a route to locally governed de-identification using real or synthetic training data.