PhD Project in Secure Record Linkage

Location: United Kingdom
Application Deadline: 28 February 2025
Published: 4 weeks ago

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Overview

Record linkage is the technique which aims to link the records from two or more distinct sources. This has been commonly adopted in biomedical informatics to link electronic health records (EHRs) of the same patient in different medical institutions, e.g., for building the longitudinal health profile of the patient or for de-duplicating individual records in multiple databases, etc. Due to the concerns of patients’ confidentiality and/or the institutional data sharing policy, the patient records, in particular the identity keys (e.g., the patients’ name, SSN, address, etc.), cannot be directly shared with the other party. Therefore, a secure algorithm is needed to achieve record linkage while the protected keys are only shared in their encrypted form.

In a typical scenario of secure record linkage, two parties each hold a private data set of patients’ records, and wish to identify the patients shared by both data sets based on the matched identity keys (e.g. first/last name, email, phone number, SSN, address/zip code, birth date, gender, etc). Notably, in practice, the record linkage is non-trivial because:

1) keys may be missing, while the others can be inaccurate in both datasets, e.g., the address may be changed, the name may contain typos etc; and

2) one dataset may contain multiple records from the same or very similar (e.g., from the same family) patients.

Here, the task is to research and design a secure record linkage algorithm for two parties, each holding a private dataset of patients’ records, to identify the shared records using multiple, possibly non-unique, keys without sharing each party’s dataset with the other party in plaintext. It is desirable that the algorithm will be scalable to the datasets consisting of millions of records, and does not involve a
trusted third party in the computation. Two approaches could be explored for these purpose namely:

1) Private Set Intersection and
2) Mutable Trapdoor in public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS).

Funding Information

To be eligible for consideration for a Home DfE or EPSRC Studentship (covering tuition fees and maintenance stipend of approx. £19,237 per annum), a candidate must satisfy all the eligibility criteria based on nationality, residency and academic qualifications.

To be classed as a Home student, candidates must meet the following criteria and the associated residency requirements:

• Be a UK National,
or • Have settled status,
or • Have pre-settled status,
or • Have indefinite leave to remain or enter the UK.

Candidates from ROI may also qualify for Home student funding.

Previous PhD study MAY make you ineligible to be considered for funding.

Please note that other terms and conditions also apply.

Please note that any available PhD studentships will be allocated on a competitive basis across a number of projects currently being advertised by the School.

A small number of international awards will be available for allocation across the School. An international award is not guaranteed to be available for this project, and competition across the School for these awards will be highly competitive.

Academic Requirements:

The minimum academic requirement for admission is normally an Upper Second Class Honours degree from a UK or ROI Higher Education provider in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent qualification acceptable to the University.

How to Apply

Apply using our online Postgraduate Applications Portal and follow the step-by-step instructions on how to apply.

Find a supervisor

If you’re interested in a particular project, we suggest you contact the relevant academic before you apply, to introduce yourself and ask questions.

To find a potential supervisor aligned with your area of interest, or if you are unsure of who to contact, look through the staff profiles linked here.

You might be asked to provide a short outline of your proposal to help us identify potential supervisors.

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