"Male Breast Cancer Research" National Cancer Center Operates Personal Information Safe Zone

Regulations on Pseudonymized Data Processing Relaxed
Save Time and Costs, Prevent Data Damage
Operational from This Month... 8 Research Projects Selected

The National Cancer Center will officially operate the 'Healthcare Specialized Personal Information Safe Zone' starting this month.

A Personal Information Safe Zone is a system that significantly relaxes various restrictions related to usage periods and retention periods to allow more flexible processing of pseudonymized information. Instead, it requires a separately enhanced data processing environment, including personal information processing procedures and management systems, as well as network security.

The Personal Information Protection Commission designated the National Cancer Center, which houses the National Cancer Data Center, as a Safe Zone at the end of December last year. The center has secured data analysis spaces and improved systems and networks, and began operations this month.

As a result, research using medical pseudonymized information is expected to become more active. In the past, data quality was often compromised during the pseudonymization process, making research impossible or results unreliable.

However, within the Safe Zone, various studies are expected to be possible without excessively damaging data quality. Additionally, since data sampling inspections are possible in the Safe Zone, time and costs required to utilize medical imaging and big data can be saved.

Major Research Projects in the Personal Information Safe Zone at the National Cancer Center
[Source=Personal Information Protection Commission]

The National Cancer Center selected eight research projects to coincide with the opening of the Safe Zone. These included projects such as male breast cancer, where the sample size was small and data quality was degraded or research reliability was low during pseudonymization.

Ko Hak-su, Chairperson of the Personal Information Protection Commission, said, "Since the Personal Information Safe Zone provides a secure data processing environment, it will allow flexible handling of high-quality data and create various bio-health research cases."

Professor Hwang Bo-yul of the National Cancer Center suggested, "For the new policy of the Safe Zone to settle, the pseudonymization review criteria also need to be newly established accordingly," and requested that the Personal Information Protection Commission play an active role in the review process.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.