Decentralized Learning in Healthcare: A Review of Emerging Techniques
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent developments in deep learning have contributed to numerous success stories in healthcare. The performance of a deep learning model generally improves with the size of the training data. However, there are privacy, ownership, and regulatory issues that prevent combining medical data into traditional centralized storage. Decentralized learning approaches enable collaborative model training by distributing the learning process among several nodes or devices. Conceptually, decentralized learning builds on earlier work in distributed optimization, but the focus of this paper is on recent and emerging techniques such as Federated Learning (FL), Split Learning (SL), and hybrid Split-Federated Learning (SFL). With common, universal deep learning models and centralized aggregator servers, FL overcomes the difficulties of centralized training. Additionally, patient data remains at the local party, upholding the security and anonymity of the data. SL enables machine learning without directly accessing data on clients or end devices. It further enhances privacy in a decentralized setting and mitigates clients’ storage issues. In this survey, we first provide a contemporary survey of FL, SL, and SFL approaches. Second, we discuss their state-of-the-art applications in healthcare, particularly in medical image analysis. Third, we review these emerging decentralized learning approaches under challenging conditions such as statistical and system heterogeneity, privacy preservation, communication efficiency, fairness, etc. Then, we address existing approaches to tackle these challenges. We detail unique complications related to healthcare applications including data, privacy and security, and communication challenges. Finally, we outline potential areas for further research on emerging decentralized learning techniques in healthcare, including developing personalized models, reducing bias, incorporating hybrid non-IID features, hyperparameter tuning, developing sufficient incentive mechanisms, and incorporating domain expertise knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.056 | 0.059 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".