Main menu
You are here
Historical Interest Only
Privacy Protection for a Brain Imaging Databank
In recent years there has been an increasing trend towards releasing micro-data to the public. This can be very important for research, but in some cases (e.g. medical data) these releases are limited due to privacy protection issues. Anonymisation is a limited solution that does not fully protect the individuals. Even when all the personal identifiers have been removed it might be possible to identify an individual from an anonymous records using quasi-identifiers and data linking with some other external data source (see references).
In order to build a Normative Brain Imaging Bank we plan to collect a considerable amount of brain imaging, clinical, demographic and other data. To fully exploit the potential of such a resource the data has to be shared with other researchers.
The project consists in exploring the privacy risks of such a resource. The student will have access to the database schema, but not to the actual data. She will have to produce realistic simulated data to test her solutions. This solution will be a recomendation on what data items is safe to release etc.
