Federated Learning in Neurology: Bridging Data Privacy and Artificial Intelligence for Brain Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neurological disorders affect hundreds of millions globally, yet translating artificial intelligence (AI) advances into clinical practice remains challenging due to fragmented, privacy-sensitive datasets. Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw patient data. This review synthesizes FL applications in neurology from 2020 to 2025, spanning neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and electronic health records. We analyze real-world deployments, highlight algorithmic trends, and discuss technical, regulatory, and organizational barriers to clinical translation. While FL demonstrates feasibility in tasks such as brain tumor segmentation, multiple sclerosis lesion detection, and electronic health record-based predictive modeling, verified clinical implementations remain scarce. We outline strategies to enhance adoption, including privacy-preserving techniques, standardized infrastructures, domain-adaptive algorithms, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. By bridging technical innovation with regulatory compliance and operational scalability, FL holds significant potential to advance precision neurology while safeguarding patient privacy.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".