Background: Medical case reports published in academic journals often contain images, including patient photographs. Photographs from published case reports have previously been found in online image search results such as Google Image Search. This means that patient photographs circulate beyond the original journal website and can be freely accessed online. While this raises ethical and legal concerns, no systematic study has documented how often this occurs.
Objective:The aim of this cross-sectional study was to provide systematic evidence that patient photographs from case reports published in medical journals appear in Google Image Search results.