Morpheus: a fully local, defense-in-depth de-identification engine for Greek clinical text - a benchmark evaluation

Overview & Synopsis

Background and Objective: Clinical free text cannot leave the hospital without de-identification, yet no de-identification system or benchmark exists for Greek clinical text. We evaluated Morpheus, a fully local de-identification pipeline for Greek clinical documents, on 500 synthetic discharge summaries. Methods: The notes (300 cardiac surgery, 100 cardiology, 100 nephrology) were generated by a frontier large language model (Gemini 3.1 Pro) constrained to authentic Greek hospital document layouts. Notes were pre-annotated at generation; two clinicians then independently reviewed and corrected every note, blinded to each other, with disagreements arbitrated. Primary outcomes were recall over must-redact identifiers and over-redaction of clinical content, measured over must-survive probes. Secondary outcomes: residual leaks flagged by an independent egress-review layer, processing time and reproducibility. Results: Inter-annotator agreement was F1 = 0.998. The de-identification rate was 96.59% (7,666/7,937 identifier instances; 95% CI 96.16-96.96): 98.49% for direct and 93.42% for quasi-identifiers. No patient's own complete identifier survived in any note; of 271 residual instances, 199 (73.4%) concerned institutional identity, chiefly the hospital letterhead. The over-redaction rate was 2.82% (190/6,747 probes; 95% CI 2.45-3.24). The egress guard flagged 2 of 271 residuals, both complete telephone numbers. Two independent runs gave identical verdicts. Conclusions: A fully local, deterministic pipeline removed 98.5% of direct patient identifiers from Greek clinical text while altering under 3% of protected clinical content; most residuals concerned the institution, not the patient. To our knowledge this is the first benchmark evaluation of clinical-text de-identification for Greek and the first quantified evaluation of an independent egress-guard layer.