Published in

Nature Research, Communications Biology, 1(5), 2022

DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03727-9

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Brainprints: identifying individuals from magnetoencephalograms

Journal article published in 2022 by Shenghao Wu, Aaditya Ramdas, Leila Wehbe ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

AbstractMagnetoencephalography (MEG) is used to study a wide variety of cognitive processes. Increasingly, researchers are adopting principles of open science and releasing their MEG data. While essential for reproducibility, sharing MEG data has unforeseen privacy risks. Individual differences may make a participant identifiable from their anonymized recordings. However, our ability to identify individuals based on these individual differences has not yet been assessed. Here, we propose interpretable MEG features to characterize individual difference. We term these features brainprints (brain fingerprints). We show through several datasets that brainprints accurately identify individuals across days, tasks, and even between MEG and Electroencephalography (EEG). Furthermore, we identify consistent brainprint components that are important for identification. We study the dependence of identifiability on the amount of data available. We also relate identifiability to the level of preprocessing and the experimental task. Our findings reveal specific aspects of individual variability in MEG. They also raise concerns about unregulated sharing of brain data, even if anonymized.