Record linkage based patient intersection cardinality for rare disease studies using Mainzelliste and secure multi-party computation.

Background: The low number of patients suffering from any given rare diseases poses a difficult problem for medical research: With the exception of some specialized biobanks and disease registries, potential study participants' information are disjoint and distributed over many medical institutions. Whenever some of those facilities are in close proximity, a significant overlap of patients can reasonably be expected, further complicating statistical study feasibility assessments and data gathering. Due to the sensitive nature of medical records and identifying data, data transfer and joint computations are often forbidden by law or associated with prohibitive amounts of effort.

MAGICPL: A Generic Process Description Language for Distributed Pseudonymization Scenarios.

Objectives:  Pseudonymization is an important aspect of projects dealing with sensitive patient data. Most projects build their own specialized, hard-coded, solutions. However, these overlap in many aspects of their functionality.