The intent behind our opinion paper in European Radiology aimed to highlight some of the challenges in data management and ownership that need to be recognized by radiologists, as well as health professionals in general, as handlers of patient data. We live in an age of large-scale data scraping through the internet, with little regard to regulations and ownership rights of said data in many cases. On one hand, these practices have led to a small technological revolution, allowing for the training of artificial intelligence models on a scale, and at a computational cost, which would have seemed unimaginable one or two decades ago. However, it is also true that the companies behind these practices often ignore, or are not necessarily subject to, the privacy and data regulatory standards which protect health data, including imaging exams.
We should recognize that certain behaviors radiologists engage in, such as the anonymous sharing of cases on social media, may lead to undesirable consequences, including collecting such data for uses beyond our control and possibly without adequate supervision. At the same time, the educational benefits of the internet and the collection of cases for teaching purposes have positively impacted our community. A clear, actionable solution may not be possible given the current legal and technical framework in which we operate, but the need for greater awareness among health professionals appears as an indispensable first step to finding a balance between sharing knowledge and preventing patient data misuse.
Article: The quest for open datasets: all that glitters is not gold
Authors: Gennaro D’Anna, Lorenzo Ugga & Renato Cuocolo
