One kind of noisy data that healthcare data scientists deal with is scanned documents and images: from PDF attachments of lab results, referrals, or genetic testing to DICOM files with medical imaging.
These files are challenging to de-identify because personal health information (PHI) can appear anywhere in free text – so cannot be removed with rules or regular expressions – or “burned” into images so that it’s not even available as digital text, to begin with.
