7 ms·

Just as a general note, these images contain personally identifying information about the patient. This includes not just the patient's name, but also his age,

Just as a general note, these images contain personally identifying information about the patient. This includes not just the patient's name, but also his age, address, phone number, and an extremely limited health history.

tedivm 11y ago
Are you sure? I see his doctor's phone number and address but that's it.
- trickyager 11y ago
  Most definitely. Using the pydicom library, you can view all of the metadata stored along with the images. For instance, the patient's telephone number is listed with a 540 area code.
  - dewarrn1 11y ago
    I have not and will not peek at the DICOM, but anyone else thinking about doing something like this should heed the preceding comments and be aware that stripping PHI headers is critical to deidentifying medical imaging data. Also, the imaging data itself can also be identifying — best practice for sharing deidentified neuroimaging data involves face-stripping.
- barrkel 11y ago
  About 20% of the file is metadata, from a brief scan of it.
fencepost 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that he's legally allowed to release his own PHI and PII. Since the README includes "I open sourced my brain. Here it is," it's from "dcunited001" and the scans are for David Conner, I'm pretty sure this is the person in question releasing his own information.
- kendallpark 11y ago
  I don't think people are questioning the right for him to release his MRI scans. I think we are wondering if the patient is aware of how much of his private info is being released in the scan.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  He is legally allowed, yes. The question is whether he intended to and whether he even knew about it.
alister 11y ago
The original poster (being savvy enough to use GitHub, etc.) was probably aware of this but didn't think it was worth his time to carefully edit out that info. It's too bad we don't have a universal way of sanitizing all meta data from JPEGs, PDFs, Word files, and everything else at the click of a button. Something that's really simple and quick to use. I'm aware that there are lots of separate little tools and hacks to deal with sanitizing or anonymizing, but I wish there were either a standalone tool that dealt with every kind of common file, or a "Sanitize" button that was a standard feature in every viewer, editor, or browser (when uploading for example).
- lostlogin 11y ago
  You can export anonymised files from Osirix very easily. You can also just anonymise the fields you want to easily. I'm yet to see a dicom viewer as good as Osirix - it's simple to use and has every feature I've ever wanted. How the paid viewers get it so wrong is beyond me.
  - funkjames 11y ago
    Have you tried Horos?
- dcunit3d 11y ago
  it was in the name of science, of course! i'm pleasantly surprised to see some of the discussions on here, concerning copyright and health data ownership. =] i was aware of the privacy implications. i briefly looked at the data in osirix that i would be exposing and decided that it was worth it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
brooklyndude 11y ago
I would LOVE to have my scans crowd sourced. Having my name out there would be of little concern to me.
dcunit3d 11y ago
For the record, i wanted to post my brain online for many reasons. First of all, I did it for science of course. It'd be great for more of this data to be available online for people to study and work with. There are many anonymized datasets available on Radiopaedia. http://radiopaedia.org/ http://radiopaedia.org/ I've spent quite a bit of time studying neurological conditions on that site and on wikipedia. Those are more useful, but anonymized. I'm not sure that there are many healthy MRI datasets available there, which makes it more difficult to statistically model MRI data. I'm hoping to use Nipy and Dipy to create visualizations of my brain. In particular, i'm hoping to recreate some of the Diffusion Tensor Imaging work in this talk by Ariel Rokem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdrSZtB0uX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdrSZtB0uX0. However, i'm not sure if my DT images are high enough resolution. I also did it for philosophical reasons. I believe that all digitized information past and present will be inevitably become known & public post facto. It's the nature of information & knowledge in our technological world to distribute itself until the world converges on total information omnipresence. So if, in the end, all [digitized] information is known, then there is no point in hiding information. This is more of a philosophical viewpoint though. obviously it's impossible for all information to converge in this way. But this is true even of our own minds. And if our mind can be digitized from our brain, this also has interesting security implications. If you've seen the show stitchers, then you know what i mean. Under no circumstances was this done in the name of art.
- dcunit3d 11y ago
  Also, I wanted my brain to be online in a widely distributed, public manner. In case of robot apocalypse of course. Hopefully, a quantum computer in the future would have low-bandwidth write access to my brain in the past. Quantum mechanics. Then I would be one of the earliest widely-distributed, targetable maps of a human brain on the public internet. And the people of the future could avert a worldwide AI disaster by pinging memories directly into layers of my brain. A la Steins;Gate, if haven't seen it, you should. Anyways....
  - lucaspiller 11y ago
    You probably want to change all the passwords you remember, to something randomly generated not by you - just in case :-)
nickpsecurity 11y ago
And how their brain works to a degree. Given what people find with MRI's, I think that will eventually have security implications.

tedivm 11y ago

Are you sure? I see his doctor's phone number and address but that's it.

trickyager 11y ago
Most definitely. Using the pydicom library, you can view all of the metadata stored along with the images. For instance, the patient's telephone number is listed with a 540 area code.
- dewarrn1 11y ago
  I have not and will not peek at the DICOM, but anyone else thinking about doing something like this should heed the preceding comments and be aware that stripping PHI headers is critical to deidentifying medical imaging data. Also, the imaging data itself can also be identifying — best practice for sharing deidentified neuroimaging data involves face-stripping.
barrkel 11y ago
About 20% of the file is metadata, from a brief scan of it.

fencepost 11y ago

I'm pretty sure that he's legally allowed to release his own PHI and PII. Since the README includes "I open sourced my brain. Here it is," it's from "dcunited001" and the scans are for David Conner, I'm pretty sure this is the person in question releasing his own information.

kendallpark 11y ago
I don't think people are questioning the right for him to release his MRI scans. I think we are wondering if the patient is aware of how much of his private info is being released in the scan.
rdtsc 11y ago
He is legally allowed, yes. The question is whether he intended to and whether he even knew about it.

alister 11y ago

The original poster (being savvy enough to use GitHub, etc.) was probably aware of this but didn't think it was worth his time to carefully edit out that info. It's too bad we don't have a universal way of sanitizing all meta data from JPEGs, PDFs, Word files, and everything else at the click of a button. Something that's really simple and quick to use. I'm aware that there are lots of separate little tools and hacks to deal with sanitizing or anonymizing, but I wish there were either a standalone tool that dealt with every kind of common file, or a "Sanitize" button that was a standard feature in every viewer, editor, or browser (when uploading for example).

lostlogin 11y ago
You can export anonymised files from Osirix very easily. You can also just anonymise the fields you want to easily. I'm yet to see a dicom viewer as good as Osirix - it's simple to use and has every feature I've ever wanted. How the paid viewers get it so wrong is beyond me.
- funkjames 11y ago
  Have you tried Horos?
dcunit3d 11y ago
it was in the name of science, of course! i'm pleasantly surprised to see some of the discussions on here, concerning copyright and health data ownership. =] i was aware of the privacy implications. i briefly looked at the data in osirix that i would be exposing and decided that it was worth it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

brooklyndude 11y ago

I would LOVE to have my scans crowd sourced. Having my name out there would be of little concern to me.

dcunit3d 11y ago

For the record, i wanted to post my brain online for many reasons. First of all, I did it for science of course. It'd be great for more of this data to be available online for people to study and work with. There are many anonymized datasets available on Radiopaedia. http://radiopaedia.org/ http://radiopaedia.org/ I've spent quite a bit of time studying neurological conditions on that site and on wikipedia. Those are more useful, but anonymized. I'm not sure that there are many healthy MRI datasets available there, which makes it more difficult to statistically model MRI data. I'm hoping to use Nipy and Dipy to create visualizations of my brain. In particular, i'm hoping to recreate some of the Diffusion Tensor Imaging work in this talk by Ariel Rokem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdrSZtB0uX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdrSZtB0uX0. However, i'm not sure if my DT images are high enough resolution. I also did it for philosophical reasons. I believe that all digitized information past and present will be inevitably become known & public post facto. It's the nature of information & knowledge in our technological world to distribute itself until the world converges on total information omnipresence. So if, in the end, all [digitized] information is known, then there is no point in hiding information. This is more of a philosophical viewpoint though. obviously it's impossible for all information to converge in this way. But this is true even of our own minds. And if our mind can be digitized from our brain, this also has interesting security implications. If you've seen the show stitchers, then you know what i mean. Under no circumstances was this done in the name of art.

dcunit3d 11y ago
Also, I wanted my brain to be online in a widely distributed, public manner. In case of robot apocalypse of course. Hopefully, a quantum computer in the future would have low-bandwidth write access to my brain in the past. Quantum mechanics. Then I would be one of the earliest widely-distributed, targetable maps of a human brain on the public internet. And the people of the future could avert a worldwide AI disaster by pinging memories directly into layers of my brain. A la Steins;Gate, if haven't seen it, you should. Anyways....
- lucaspiller 11y ago
  You probably want to change all the passwords you remember, to something randomly generated not by you - just in case :-)

nickpsecurity 11y ago

And how their brain works to a degree. Given what people find with MRI's, I think that will eventually have security implications.