Anonymization of electronic medical records for validating genome-wide association studies.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) facilitate the discovery of genotype-phenotype relations from population-based sequence databases, which is an integral facet of personalized medicine. The increasing adoption of electronic medical records allows large amounts of patients' standardized clinical features to be combined with the genomic sequences of these patients and shared to support validation of GWAS findings and to enable novel discoveries. However, disseminating these data "as is" may lead to patient reidentification when genomic sequences are linked to resources that contain the corresponding patients' identity information based on standardized clinical features. This work proposes an approach that provably prevents this type of data linkage and furnishes a result that helps supp

SUBMITTER: Loukides G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2867915 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature