MIT scientists investigate memorization risk in the age of clinical AI
Brief
What is patient privacy for? The Hippocratic Oath, thought to be one of the earliest and most widely known medical ethics texts in the world, reads: “Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.”
As privacy becomes increasingly scarce in the age of data-hungry algorithms and cyberattacks, medicine is one of the few remaining domains where confidentiality remains central to practice, enabling patients to trust their physicians with sensitive information.
But a paper co-authored by MIT researchers investigates how artificial intelligence models trained on de-identified electronic health records (EHRs) can memorize patient-specific information.