Comparing de‐facing software MiDeFace and mri_reface according to privacy protection and effects on downstream measurements
Christopher G Schwarz, Carl M Prakaashana, Walter K Kremers, Jeffrey L Gunter, Matthew L Senjem, Prashanthi Vemuri, Kejal Kantarci, Jonathan Graff‐Radford, David S Knopman, Ronald C Petersen, Clifford R Jack, The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative · 2025
Read Comparing de‐facing software MiDeFace and mri_reface according to privacy protection and effects on downstream measurements by Christopher G Schwarz, Carl M Prakaashana, Walter K Kremers, Jeffrey L Gunter, Matthew L Senjem, Prashanthi Vemuri, Kejal Kantarci, Jonathan Graff‐Radford, David S Knopman, Ronald C Petersen, Clifford R Jack, The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11715724.txt.
Description
Christopher G Schwarz and co-authors compare two de-facing programs, MiDeFace and mri_reface, which remove faces from brain scans before the scans are shared. A face left in a scan can be matched to a photograph and re-identify a study participant. MiDeFace ships with a common imaging suite, while mri_reface has often won past comparisons. Their 2025 study ran both tools on two datasets of scans with known photographs.
A face recognition program named the right person in about 98 percent of unmodified scans. That rate fell to about 8 percent with one tool and about 12 percent with the other. Visual checks showed one tool more often removed the whole face while keeping the whole brain. Both tools shifted later brain measurements only slightly, and by nearly the same amount. The authors give the edge to the tool with the lower match rate.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Christopher G Schwarz, Carl M Prakaashana, Walter K Kremers, Jeffrey L Gunter, Matthew L Senjem, Prashanthi Vemuri, Kejal Kantarci, Jonathan Graff‐Radford, David S Knopman, Ronald C Petersen, Clifford R Jack, The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 3 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |