Skip to content
naulon

No retraction, correction or concern found when last checked on Oct 15, 2026.

The future of digital health with federated learning

Nicola Rieke, Jonny Hancox, Wenqi Li and 14 more

npj Digital Medicine · 2020 · Review · CC BY

doi:10.1038/s41746-020-00323-1

Abstract

Data-driven machine learning (ML) has emerged as a promising approach for building accurate and robust statistical models from medical data, which is collected in huge volumes by modern healthcare systems. Existing medical data is not fully exploited by ML primarily because it sits in data silos and privacy concerns restrict access to this data. However, without access to sufficient data, ML will be prevented from reaching its full potential and, ultimately, from making the transition from research to clinical practice. This paper considers key factors contributing to this issue, explores how federated learning (FL) may provide a solution for the future of digital health and highlights the challenges and considerations that need to be addressed.

Full text

Its licence does not allow us to show the full text. Read it at PubMed Central:

Read at PubMed Central

References 64

  1. 1.
    Deep learning · 2015
    No notice
  2. 2.

    Wang F, Casalino LP, Khullar D. Deep learning in medicine—promise, progress, and challenges. JAMA Intern. Med. 2019;179:293-294.

    Not in our library10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.7117

  3. 3.

    Chartrand G, et al. Deep learning: a primer for radiologists. Radiographics. 2017;37:2113-2131.

    Not in our library10.1148/rg.2017170077

  4. 4.

    De Fauw J, et al. Clinically applicable deep learning for diagnosis and referral in retinal disease. Nat. Med. 2018;24:1342.

    Not in our library10.1038/s41591-018-0107-6

  5. 5.

    Sun, C., Shrivastava, A., Singh, S. & Gupta, A. Revisiting unreasonable effectiveness of data in deep learning era. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, 843–852 (IEEE, 2017).

    Not in our library

  6. 6.
  7. 7.
  8. 8.

    Schwarz CG, et al. Identification of anonymous mri research participants with face-recognition software. N. Engl. J. Med. 2019;381:1684-1686.

    Not in our library10.1056/nejmc1908881

  9. 9.

    McMahan, B., Moore, E., Ramage, D., Hampson, S. & y Arcas, B. A. Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data. In Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 1273–1282. https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Communicationefficient+learning+of+deep+networks+from+decentralized+data&btnG= (2017).

    Not in our library

  10. 10.

    Li, T., Sahu, A. K., Talwalkar, A. & Smith, V. Federated learning: Challenges, methods, and future directions. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine37, 50–60 (IEEE, 2020).

    Not in our library

  11. 11.

    Yang Q, Liu Y, Chen T, Tong Y. Federated machine learning: concept and applications. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. 2019;10:12.

    Not in our library

  12. 12.

    Kairouz, P. et al. Advances and open problems in federated learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.04977 (2019).

    Not in our library

  13. 13.

    Lee J, et al. Privacy-preserving patient similarity learning in a federated environment: development and analysis. JMIR Med. Inform. 2018;6:e20.

    Not in our library10.2196/medinform.7744

  14. 14.

    Brisimi TS, et al. Federated learning of predictive models from federated electronic health records. Int. J. Med. Inform. 2018;112:59-67.

    Not in our library10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2018.01.007

  15. 15.

    Roy, A. G., Siddiqui, S., Pölsterl, S., Navab, N. & Wachinger, C. Braintorrent: a peer-to-peer environment for decentralized federated learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.06731 (2019).

    Not in our library

  16. 16.

    Li, W. et al. Privacy-preserving federated brain tumour segmentation. In International Workshop on Machine Learning in Medical Imaging, 133–141 (Springer, 2019).

    Not in our library10.1007/978-3-030-32692-0_16

  17. 17.

    Sheller, M. J., Reina, G. A., Edwards, B., Martin, J. & Bakas, S. Multi-institutional deep learning modeling without sharing patient data: a feasibility study on brain tumor segmentation. In International MICCAI Brainlesion Workshop, 92–104 (Springer, 2018).

    Not in our library10.1007/978-3-030-11723-8_9

  18. 18.

    Li, X. et al. Multi-site fmri analysis using privacy-preserving federated learning and domain adaptation: abide results. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.05647 (2020).

    Not in our library10.1016/j.media.2020.101765

  19. 19.

    Huang L, et al. Patient clustering improves efficiency of federated machine learning to predict mortality and hospital stay time using distributed electronic medical records. J. Biomed. Inform. 2019;99:103291.

    Not in our library10.1016/j.jbi.2019.103291

  20. 20.

    Xu, J. & Wang, F. Federated learning for healthcare informatics. arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.06270 (2019).

    Not in our library

  21. 21.

    Roy, A. & Banerjee, A. Ibm’s merge healthcare acquisition. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merge-healthcare-m-a-ibm/ibm-to-buy-merge-healthcare-in-1-billion-deal-idUSKCN0QB1ML20150806 (2015) (Accessed 10 February 2020).

    Not in our library

  22. 22.

    Nhs scotland’s national safe haven. https://www.gov.scot/publications/charter-safe-havens-scotland-handling-unconsented-data-national-health-service-patient-records-support-research-statistics/pages/4/ (2015) (Accessed 10 February 2020).

    Not in our library

  23. 23.

    Cuggia M, Combes S. The french health data hub and the german medical informatics initiatives: Two national projects to promote data sharing in healthcare. Yearbook Med. Informat. 2019;28:195-202.

    Not in our library10.1055/s-0039-1677917

  24. 24.

    Health Data Research UK. https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/ (Health Data Research UK, 2020) (Accessed 10 Feb 2020).

    Not in our library

  25. 25.
  26. 26.
  27. 27.

    Clark K, et al. The cancer imaging archive (tcia): maintaining and operating a public information repository. J. Digit. Imaging. 2013;26:1045-1057.

    Not in our library10.1007/s10278-013-9622-7

  28. 28.

    Wang, X. et al. Chestx-ray8: Hospital-scale chest X-ray database and benchmarks on weakly-supervised classification and localization of common thorax diseases. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2097–2106 (IEEE, 2017).

    Not in our library

  29. 29.

    Yan K, Wang X, Lu L, Summers RM. Deeplesion: automated mining of large-scale lesion annotations and universal lesion detection with deep learning. J Med. Imaging. 2018;5:036501.

    Not in our library10.1117/1.jmi.5.3.036501

  30. 30.

    Tomczak K, Czerwińska P, Wiznerowicz M. The cancer genome atlas (tcga): an immeasurable source of knowledge. Contemp. Oncol. 2015;19:A68.

    Not in our library10.5114/wo.2014.47136

  31. 31.

    Jack Jr. CR, et al. The alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging initiative (adni): Mri methods. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging. 2008;27:685-691.

    Not in our library10.1002/jmri.21049

  32. 32.

    Grand Challenge-a Platform for End-to-end Development of Machine Learning Solutions in Biomedical Imaging. https://grand-challenge.org/ (2020) (Accessed 24 July 2020).

    Not in our library

  33. 33.
  34. 34.

    Menze BH, et al. The multimodal brain tumor image segmentation benchmark (brats). IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging. 2014;34:1993-2024.

    Not in our library10.1109/tmi.2014.2377694

  35. 35.

    Bakas, S. et al. Identifying the best machine learning algorithms for brain tumor segmentation, progression assessment, and overall survival prediction in the brats challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.02629 (2018).

    Not in our library

  36. 36.
  37. 37.

    Simpson, A. L. et al. A large annotated medical image dataset for the development and evaluation of segmentation algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.09063 (2019).

    Not in our library

  38. 38.
  39. 39.

    Chang K, et al. Distributed deep learning networks among institutions for medical imaging. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 2018;25:945-954.

    Not in our library10.1093/jamia/ocy017

  40. 40.

    Shokri, R., Stronati, M., Song, C. & Shmatikov, V. Membership inference attacks against machine learning models. In 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), 3-18 (IEEE, 2017).

    Not in our library

  41. 41.

    Sablayrolles, A., Douze, M., Ollivier, Y., Schmid, C. & Jégou, H. White-box vs black-box: Bayes optimal strategies for membership inference. In Chaudhuri, K. & Salakhutdinov, R. (eds) Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning, {ICML}97, 5558–5567. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v97/sablayrolles19a.html (PMLR, 2019).

    Not in our library

  42. 42.

    Zhang, C., Bengio, S., Hardt, M., Recht, B. & Vinyals, O. Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization. In 5thInternational Conference on Learning Representations, {ICLR}.https://openreview.net/forum?id=Sy8gdB9xx, (OpenReview.net, 2017).

    Not in our library

  43. 43.

    Carlini, N., Liu, C., Erlingsson, Ú., Kos, J. & Song, D. The secret sharer: evaluating and testing unintended memorization in neural networks. In Heninger, N. & Traynor, P. (eds) 28th {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 19, 267–284. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/carlini ({USENIX} Association, Santa Clara, CA, USA, 2019).

    Not in our library

  44. 44.

    Abadi, M. et al. Deep learning with differential privacy. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 308–318 (ACM, 2016).

    Not in our library

  45. 45.

    Shokri, R. & Shmatikov, V. Privacy-preserving deep learning. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security, 1310–1321 (ACM, 2015).

    Not in our library

  46. 46.

    Langlotz CP, et al. A roadmap for foundational research on artificial intelligence in medical imaging: from the 2018 nih/rsna/acr/the academy workshop. Radiology. 2019;291:781-791.

    Not in our library10.1148/radiol.2019190613

  47. 47.

    Kim, Y., Sun, J., Yu, H. & Jiang, X. Federated Tensor Factorization for Computational Phenotyping. In Proceedings of the 23rd {ACM} {SIGKDD} International Conference on Knowledge Discoveryand Data Mining. 887–895. 10.1145/3097983.3098118 (ACM, Halifax, NS, Canada, 2017).

    Not in our library10.1145/3097983.3098118

  48. 48.

    He, C., Annavaram, M. & Avestimehr, S. Fednas: Federated deep learning via neural architecture search. https://sites.google.com/view/cvpr20-nas/ (2020).

    Not in our library

  49. 49.

    Trustworthy federated data analytics (tfda). https://tfda.hmsp.center/ (2020) (Accessed 28 May 2020).

    Not in our library

  50. 50.

    Joint Imaging Platform (Jip). https://jip.dktk.dkfz.de/jiphomepage/ (2020) (Accessed 28 May 2020).

    Not in our library

  51. 51.

    Medical institutions collaborate to improve mammogram assessment ai. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/04/15/federated-learning-mammogram-assessment/ (2020) (Accessed 28 May 2020).

    Not in our library

  52. 52.

    Healthchain consortium. https://www.substra.ai/en/healthchain-project (2020) (Accessed 28 May 2020).

    Not in our library

  53. 53.

    The federated tumor segmentation (fets) initiative. https://www.fets.ai (2020) (Accessed 28 May 2020).

    Not in our library

  54. 54.

    Machine learning ledger orchestration for drug discovery. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/831472 (2020). Accessed 28 May 2020.

    Not in our library

  55. 55.

    Konečny`, J., McMahan, H. B., Ramage, D. & Richtárik, P. Federated optimization: Distributed machine learning for on-device intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.02527 (2016).

    Not in our library

  56. 56.

    Lalitha, A., Kilinc, O. C., Javidi, T. & Koushanfar, F. Peer-to-peer federated learning on graphs. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.11173 (2019).

    Not in our library

  57. 57.

    Li, T., Sahu, A. K., Zaheer, M., Sanjabi, M., Talwalkar, A. & Smith, V. Federated optimization in heterogeneous networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.06127 (2018).

    Not in our library

  58. 58.

    Zhao, Y. et al. Federated learning with non-iid data. arxivabs/1806.00582 (2018).

    Not in our library

  59. 59.

    Li, X., Huang, K., Yang, W., Wang, S. & Zhang, Z. On the convergence of fedavg on non-IID data. https://openreview.net/forum?id=HJxNAnVtDS (2020).

    Not in our library

  60. 60.

    Wu, B. et al. P3sgd: patient privacy preserving SGD for regularizing deep CNNs in pathological image classification. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 2099–2108) (2019).

    Not in our library

  61. 61.

    Zhu, L., Liu, Z. & Han, S. Deep leakage from gradients. In Wallach, H. M. et al. (eds) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 14747–14756. http://papers.nips.cc/paper/9617-deep-leakage-from-gradients (2019).

    Not in our library

  62. 62.

    Wang, Z. et al. Beyond inferring class representatives: user-level privacy leakage from federated learning. In 2019 {IEEE} Conferenceon Computer Communications, {INFOCOM} 2512–2520. 10.1109/INFOCOM.2019.8737416 (IEEE, Paris, France, 2019).

    Not in our library

  63. 63.

    Hitaj, B., Ateniese, G. & Perez-Cruz, F. Deep models under the gan: information leakage from collaborative deep learning. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS’17, 603–618 (Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2017).

    Not in our library

  64. 64.

    Ghorbani, A. & Zou, J. Data shapley: Equitable valuation of data for machine learning. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 2242-2251) (2019).

    Not in our library

Cited by papers we hold 9

Reads

Read by people on this page

None yet.

Checked or read by AI through naulon

None yet.

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.

Are you an author?

Is this your paper?

Claim it to add your note and be paid when agents cite it. Free.