MainSEL

MainSEL performs privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) across medical and other sensitive datasets using secure multi-party computation (SMC) to link records without revealing personally identifiable information (PII).

Key Features:

• Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage: Enables linkage of medical databases and other sensitive datasets at the record level even in the absence of exact identifiers such as names or dates of birth.
• Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC): Employs SMC techniques so parties can compute matches without exposing PII and without relying on a trusted third party.
• Fault-Tolerant Framework: Provides robust performance under challenging network conditions with benchmarks reporting ~48 seconds to link a patient record against 10,000 records over a 100 ms delayed connection and ~3.9 seconds with low-latency connections.
• Integration with Mainzelliste: Built on the medical record-keeping software Mainzelliste to support secure linkage tasks while preserving data integrity and privacy.

Scientific Applications:

• Healthcare and Biomedical Research: Facilitates integration of patient records from multiple institutions to support comprehensive data analysis while protecting PII.
• Multi-Institutional Collaboration: Enables linkage across institutions to conduct large-scale studies and combine disparate datasets without exposing sensitive identifiers.

Methodology:

MainSEL applies cryptographic techniques and secure computation protocols, implementing secure multi-party computation to perform computations on encrypted data without revealing sensitive information and eliminating the need for a trusted third party.