Target informed client recruitment for efficient federated learning in healthcare.
Journal:
BMC medical informatics and decision making
PMID:
39696193
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Modern machine learning and deep learning methods have been widely incorporated in decision making processes in healthcare in the form of decision support mechanisms. In healthcare, data are abundant but typically not centrally available and, therefore, require some form of aggregation to facilitate training procedures. Aggregating sensitive data poses a significant privacy risk, which is why, both in Europe and the United States, legal frameworks regulate the treatment of such data. Whilst these measures protect the individual behind the data, they pose a significant challenge that results in extensive legal administration related to data sharing efforts. Federated learning (FL) offers a way to mitigate these challenges by allowing to learn models in distributed fashion, eliminating the need to aggregate data for the purpose of training. However, FL comes with a new set of challenges related to communication overhead, client selection and efficiency of the FL training procedure, among others.