Matters Arising: Near-identical images, not foundation models, explain purported re-identification of patients from medical imaging

Nebbia et al. ¹ report that foundation models enable re-identification of patients in medical imaging datasets, given a known medical image of the same type of targeted individual. They postulate that this is due to the ability of foundation models to identify attributes such as age, sex or ethnicity of a person from said imaging and identify this as a risk stemming from medical foundation model research.