De-Identifying GRASCCO - A Pilot Study for the De-Identification of the German Medical Text Project (GeMTeX) Corpus

The German Medical Text Project (GeMTeX) is one of the largest infrastructure efforts targeting German-language clinical documents. We here introduce the architecture of the de-identification pipeline of GeMTeX.

This pipeline comprises the export of raw clinical documents from the local hospital information system, the import into the annotation platform INCEpTION, fully automatic pre-tagging with protected health information (PHI) items by the Averbis Health Discovery pipeline, a manual curation step of these pre-annotated data, and, finally, the automatic replacement of PHI items with type-conformant substitutes. This design was implemented in a pilot study involving six annotators and two curators each at the Data Integration Centers of the University Hospitals Leipzig and Erlangen.

As a proof of concept, the publicly available Graz Synthetic Text Clinical Corpus (GRASSCO) was enhanced with PHI annotations in an annotation campaign for which reasonable inter-annotator agreement values of Krippendorff's α ≈ 0.97 can be reported.

These curated 1.4 K PHI annotations are released as open-source data constituting the first publicly available German clinical language text corpus with PHI metadata.