Data Privacy and Security

Recent years have seen an outburst in clinical and genomic data stockpiled in huge biomedical data warehouses. Access to this data offers a unique opportunity to undertake biomedical research and may improve quality of care, reduce healthcare costs and advance personalized medicine. However, the availability of such data for widespread research activities is dependent on the protection of participants privacy.

In fact, biomedical data sharing is governed by legislations that aim to ensure that private information is properly used and adequately protected when disclosed for research purposes (such as the Common rule, HIPAA, and GDPR). The legislations generally permit data sharing when Informed consents is available or when the data is adequately de-identified.

Current technological methods for privacy preservation are outdated and cannot provide adequate protection for current biomedical data. The inadequacy of current privacy protection method, and the pressing need to benefit from the large biomedical data warehouses being built worldwide is our main driver for seeking new innovative solutions. Our research tries to solve the privacy problem in multiple contexts through novel de-identification methods, novel consent mechanisms as well as novel privacy-preserving data-mining techniques.