A decentralized federated learning-based cancer survival prediction method with privacy protection

Survival prediction is one of the crucial goals in precision medicine, as accurate survival assessment can aid physicians in selecting appropriate treatment for individual patients. To achieve this aim, extensive data must be utilized to train the prediction model and prevent overfitting. However, the collection of patient data for disease prediction is challenging due to potential variations in data sources across institutions and concerns regarding privacy and ownership issues in data sharing. To facilitate the integration of cancer data from different institutions without violating privacy laws, we developed a federated learning-based data integration framework called AdFed, which can be used to evaluate patients’ survival while considering the privacy protection problem by utilizing the decentralized federated learning technology and regularization method. AdFed was tested on different cancer datasets that contain the patients’ information from different institutions. The experimental results show that AdFed using distributed data can achieve better performance in cancer survival prediction (AUC = 0.605) than the compared federated-learning-based methods (average AUC = 0.554). Additionally, to assess the biological interpretability of our method, in the case study we list 10 identified genes related to liver cancer selected by AdFed, among which 5 genes have been proved by literature review. The results indicate that AdFed outperforms better than other federated-learning-based methods, and the interpretable algorithm can select biologically significant genes and pathways while ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data.