Summary
Objective: To summarize notable research contributions published in 2017 on data sharing and
privacy issues in medical informatics.
Methods: An extensive search of PubMed/Medline, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library, IEEE
Xplore, and AAAI Digital Library was conducted to uncover the scientific contributions
published in 2017 that addressed issues of biomedical data sharing, with a focus on
data access and privacy. The selection process was based on three steps: (i) a selection
of candidate best papers, (ii) the review of the candidate best papers by a team of
international experts with respect to six predefined criteria, and (iii) the selection
of the best papers by the editorial board of the Yearbook.
Results: Five best papers were selected. They cover the lifecycle of biomedical data collection,
use, and sharing. The papers introduce 1) consenting strategies for emerging environments,
2) software for searching and retrieving datasets in organizationally distributed
environments, 3) approaches to measure the privacy risks of sharing new data increasingly
utilized in research and the clinical setting (e.g., genomic), 4) new cryptographic
techniques for querying clinical data for cohort discovery, and 5) novel game theoretic
strategies for publishing summary information about genome-phenome studies that balance
the utility of the data with potential privacy risks to the participants of such studies.
Conclusion: The papers illustrated that there is no one-size-fitsall solution to privacy while
working with biomedical data. At the same time, the papers show that there are opportunities
for leveraging newly emerging technologies to enable data use while minimizing privacy
risks.
Keywords
Health records - genomics - data sharing - privacy - security
