Federated Learning for Medical Imaging Segmentation via Dynamic Aggregation on Non-IID Data Silos

A large number of mobile devices, smart wearable devices, and medical and health sensors continue to generate massive amounts of data, making edge devices’ data explode and making it possible to implement data-driven artificial intelligence. However, the “data silos” and other issues still exist and need to be solved. Fortunately, federated learning (FL) can deal with “data silos” in the medical field, facilitating collaborative learning across multiple institutions without sharing local data and avoiding user concerns about data privacy. However, it encounters two main challenges in the medical field. One is statistical heterogeneity, also known as non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data, i.e., data being non-IID between clients, which leads to model drift. The second is limited labeling because labels are hard to obtain due to the high cost and expertise requirement. Most existing federated learning algorithms only allow for supervised training settings. In this work, we proposed a novel federated learning framework, MixFedGAN, to tackle the above issues in federated networks with dynamic aggregation and knowledge distillation. A dynamic aggregation scheme was designed to reduce the impact of current low-performing clients and improve stability. Knowledge distillation was introduced into the local generator model with a new distillation regularization loss function to prevent essential parameters of the global generator model from significantly changing. In addition, we considered two scenarios under this framework: complete annotated data and limited labeled data. An experimental analysis on four heterogeneous COVID-19 infection segmentation datasets and three heterogeneous prostate MRI segmentation datasets verified the effectiveness of the proposed federated learning method.