Federated Learning with Privacy Preserving for Multi- Institutional Three-Dimensional Brain Tumor Segmentation.

BACKGROUND AND

objectivesBrain tumors are complex diseases that require careful diagnosis and treatment. A minor error in the diagnosis may easily lead to significant consequences. Thus, one must place a premium on accurately identifying brain tumors. However, deep learning (DL) models often face challenges in obtaining sufficient medical imaging data due to legal, privacy, and technical barriers hindering data sharing between institutions. This study aims to implement a federated learning (FL) approach with privacy-preserving techniques (PPTs) directed toward segmenting brain tumor lesions in a distributed and privacy-aware manner.

methodsThe suggested approach employs a model of 3D U-Net, which is trained using federated learning on the BraTS 2020 dataset. PPTs, such as differential privacy, are included to ensure data confidentiality while managing privacy and heterogeneity challenges with minimal communication overhead. The efficiency of the model is measured in terms of Dice similarity coefficients (DSCs) and 95% Hausdorff distances (HD95) concerning the target areas concerned by tumors, which include the whole tumor (WT), tumor core (TC), and enhancing tumor core (ET).

resultsIn the validation phase, the partial federated model achieved DSCs of 86.1%, 83.3%, and 79.8%, corresponding to 95% values of 25.3 mm, 8.61 mm, and 9.16 mm for WT, TC, and ET, respectively. On the final test set, the model demonstrated improved performance, achieving DSCs of 89.85%, 87.55%, and 86.6%, with HD95 values of 22.95 mm, 8.68 mm, and 8.32 mm for WT, TC, and ET, respectively, which indicates the effectiveness of the segmentation approach, and its privacy preservation.

conclusionThis study presents a highly competitive, collaborative federated learning model with PPTs that can successfully segment brain tumor lesions without compromising patient data confidentiality. Future work will improve model generalizability and extend the framework to other medical imaging tasks.