Protected Health Information (PHI) is an important concern when handling medical images. It is the end user's responsibility to make sure PHI is handled appropriately. Flywheel has tools to assist in removing PHI from data prior to importing it into Flywheel. One example is our default de-identification tool for DICOM images when importing via either the web uploader or the CLI.
To use this tool when using the web uploader, the user will select the `Anonymize Data` checkbox before proceeding with uploading the data.
Using the `import dicom` command in the CLI, there is an optional flag `--de-identify` that will perform the same operations locally before data is imported into Flywheel.
This tool removes the DICOM tags PatientID, PatientName, and PatientBirthDate. It also rounds the PatientAge to the nearest month if it's expressed in units less than months.