'Anonymized' X-ray datasets can reveal patient identities

Chest X-rays are used around the world to screen for diseases from pneumonia to COPD. But while they play a critical role in clinical care, discovering certain abnormalities in X-rays can be a challenging task for radiologists. That's given rise to AI-powered, X-ray analyzing disease classification systems, some of which have demonstrated promising performance. However, these systems require a large amount of patient data from which to learn to make diagnoses, which can have frightening privacy implications if the data isn't properly anonymized. A study coauthored by researchers at the University Erlangen-Nurnberg in Erlangen, Germany sought to determine the extent to which patient data could be compromised by an X-ray classification system.