HarmonyTM: multi-center data harmonization applied to distributed learning for Parkinson's disease classification.

Purpose: Distributed learning is widely used to comply with data-sharing regulations and access diverse datasets for training machine learning (ML) models. The traveling model (TM) is a distributed learning approach that sequentially trains with data from one center at a time, which is especially advantageous when dealing with limited local datasets. However, a critical concern emerges when centers utilize different scanners for data acquisition, which could potentially lead models to exploit these differences as shortcuts. Although data harmonization can mitigate this issue, current methods typically rely on large or paired datasets, which can be impractical to obtain in distributed setups. Approach: We introduced HarmonyTM, a data harmonization method tailored for the TM. HarmonyTM effectively mitigates bias in the model's feature representation while retaining crucial disease-related information, all without requiring extensive datasets. Specifically, we employed adversarial training to "unlearn" bias from the features used in the model for classifying Parkinson's disease (PD). We evaluated HarmonyTM using multi-center three-dimensional (3D) neuroimaging datasets from 83 centers using 23 different scanners. Results: Our results show that HarmonyTM improved PD classification accuracy from 72% to 76% and reduced (unwanted) scanner classification accuracy from 53% to 30% in the TM setup. Conclusion: HarmonyTM is a method tailored for harmonizing 3D neuroimaging data within the TM approach, aiming to minimize shortcut learning in distributed setups. This prevents the disease classifier from leveraging scanner-specific details to classify patients with or without PD-a key aspect for deploying ML models for clinical applications.