AMICUS

Deep learning is effective in diagnosing COVID-19 and requires a large amount of data to be effectively trained. Due to data and privacy regulations, hospitals generally have no access to data from other hospitals. Federated learning (FL) has been used to solve this problem, where it utilizes a distributed setting to train models in hospitals in a privacy-preserving manner. Deploying FL is not always feasible as it requires high computation and network communication resources. This paper evaluates five FL algorithms’ performance and resource efficiency for Covid-19 detection. A decentralized setting with CNN networks is set up, and the performance of FL algorithms is compared with a centralized environment. We examined the algorithms with
varying numbers of participants, federated rounds, and selection algorithms.
Our results show that cyclic weight transfer can have better overall performance, and results are better with fewer participating hospitals. Our results demonstrate good performance for detecting COVID-19 patients and might be useful in deploying FL algorithms for covid-19 detection and medical image analysis in general.

With recent developments in medical imaging facilities, extensive medical imaging data are produced every day. This increasing amount of data provides an opportunity for researchers to develop data-driven methods and deliver better health care. However, data-driven models require a large amount of data to be adequately trained. Furthermore, there is always a limited amount of data available in each data center. Hence, deep learning models trained on local data centers might not reach their total performance capacity. One solution could be to accumulate all data from different centers into one center. However, data privacy regulations do not allow medical institutions to easily combine their data, and this becomes increasingly difficult when institutions from multiple countries are involved. Another solution is to use privacy-preserving algorithms, which can make use of all the data available in multiple centers while keeping the sensitive data private. Federated learning (FL) is such a mechanism that enables deploying large-scale machine learning models trained on different data centers without sharing sensitive data. In FL, instead of transferring data, a general model is trained on local data sets and transferred between data centers. FL has been identified as a promising field of research, with extensive possible uses in medical research and practice. This article introduces FL, with a comprehensive look into its concepts and recent research trends in medical imaging.

Federated learning is a machine learning method that allows decentralized training of deep neural networks among multiple clients while preserving the privacy of each client's data. Federated learning is instrumental in medical imaging because of the privacy considerations of medical data. Setting up federated networks in hospitals comes with unique challenges, primarily because medical imaging data and federated learning algorithms each have their own set of distinct characteristics. This article introduces federated learning algorithms in medical imaging and discusses technical challenges and considerations of real-world implementation of them.