Low resource federated learning for classification of nail disease by deploying cross-silo and heterogeneously dataset distributions.
Journal:
Scientific reports
Published Date:
Feb 7, 2026
Abstract
Nail diseases, including such common conditions as fungus, and more serious issues like melanoma, may be important clues to the overall health and require a clear diagnosis to be treated. The purpose of the paper is to create a nail disease detection system based on the advanced machine learning methods, including transfer learning and federated learning. The research seeks to show how machine learning and federated learning can be combined to detect nail disease performance with high accuracy without having to share data. The data include pictures of diverse nail conditions including Acral Lentiginous Melanoma, Onychogryphosis, and Pitting among others that are checked to maintain the quality of data in a uniform manner to facilitate the effective training of the models. The most common feature extraction models are ResNet152V2, DenseNet201, MobileNetV2, and InceptionResNetV2 that produce between 1,280 and 2,048 features per image. These characteristics are then pooled to create a unified feature space of 6,784 dimensions which is further narrowed to five major characteristics with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to create an efficient form of classification. A range of classification models, including Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) are compared, with the last one reaching the highest classification accuracy of 91.8%. The federated learning strategy enables the joint training of DL models by different clients to ensure data-privacy and has validation-accuracy rates exceeding 99-percent in both uniformly random and structured data distributions. The proposed federated learning-based models resulted high in both uniformly random and structured data distributions.
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