On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Tim Churches wrote: ... > In that thread you request prior art. The basic idea, applied to cancer > registries and using a two-way split only, is fully described in > Pommerening K, Miller M, Schidtmann I and Michaelis J. Pseudonyms for > cancer registries. Methods of Information in Medicine, 35(1996) > pp112-121.
Hi Tim, The intention may be simiar but the method is quite different. I cited the two papers that describe this work in the patent: K. Pommerening, Pseudonyms for Cancer Registries, Meth. Inform. Med. 1996; 35: 112-21. C.Quantin, et al., Irreversible Encryption Method by Generation of Polynomials, Med. Inform. (1996), vol. 21, No. 2, 113-121. Their method involves splitting of the secret (anonymization, for example) at a central anonymization office, which becomes a point of vulnerability since confidentiality can be compromised at that point. The SDSS method splits the secret at the user machine/site - which essentially pushes the vulnerability back to the point of data entry. The way that each share of the secret gets packaged for transmission between locales are also vastly different. If you read the patent carefully, you will see that these are two of the major innovations of the SDSS system. > I think your patent represents a useful re-exposition and minor > generalisation of Pommerening et al.'s idea, Thanks! I don't know what you would consider "major", but I do hope that the SDSS approach will be useful. After reviewing the SDSS patent, do you feel that you understand how it works? Do you appreciate its vulnerabilities and limitations? > but it would have better served humanity had it been published in a > peer-reviewed journal indexed in Medline/PubMed, rather than as a US > patent. I do appreciate your suggestion. I thought the field of database security is the more appropriate classification of this work. SDSS is applicable to uses beyond medicine - so a medical journal seemed less appropriate. Regarding "serving humanity", publication/disclosure is just the first step :-). > I know you also published it in the computer science/database > literature, which is fine, but people working in health informatics > don't routinely search sources in those disciplines (and v-v), > although they probably should. Most, if not all, of the people in health informatics whom I really care about are on this mailing list. We have had better and more substantive discussions on this list than at all the meetings and from all the papers that I presented/published!!! (For example, this very discussion between us today.) Since the OpenHealth archives are fully searchable via Google etc, I find publication to the OpenHealth list quite productive. Life is just too short to waste on the game of academic promotions. :-) Cheers, Andrew --- Andrew P. Ho, M.D. OIO: Open Infrastructure for Outcomes www.TxOutcome.Org (Hosting OIO Library #1 and OSHCA Mirror #1)
