Federated Deep Learning Enables Cancer Subtyping by Proteomics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artificial intelligence applications in biomedicine face major challenges from data privacy requirements. To address this issue for clinically annotated tissue proteomic data, we developed a federated deep learning approach (ProCanFDL), training local models on simulated sites containing data from a pan-cancer cohort (n = 1,260) and 29 cohorts held behind private firewalls (n = 6,265), representing 19,930 replicate data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry runs. Local parameter updates were aggregated to build the global model, achieving a 43% performance gain on the hold-out test set (n = 625) in 14 cancer subtyping tasks compared with local models and matching centralized model performance. The approach's generalizability was demonstrated by retraining the global model with data from two external, data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry cohorts (n = 55) and eight acquired by tandem mass tag proteomics (n = 832). ProCanFDL presents a solution for internationally collaborative machine learning initiatives using proteomic data, for example, for discovering predictive biomarkers or treatment targets while maintaining data privacy. SIGNIFICANCE: A federated deep learning approach applied to human proteomic data, acquired using two distinct proteomic technologies from 40 tumor cohorts across eight countries, enabled accurate cancer histopathologic subtyping while preserving data privacy. This approach will enable the privacy-compliant development of large-scale proteomic artificial intelligence models, including foundation models, across institutions globally.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".