µ -ANT: semantic microaggregation-based anonymization tool

Abstract

Motivation: Detailed patient data are crucial for medical research. Yet, these healthcare data can only be released for secondary use if they have undergone anonymization.

Results: We present and describe µ-ANT, a practical and easily configurable anonymization tool for (healthcare) data. It implements several state-of-the-art methods to offer robust privacy guarantees and preserve the utility of the anonymized data as much as possible. µ-ANT also supports the heterogenous attribute types commonly found in electronic healthcare records and targets both practitioners and software developers interested in data anonymization.

Availability and implementation: (source code, documentation, executable, sample datasets and use case examples) https://github.com/CrisesUrv/microaggregation-based_anonymization_tool.