Federated Learning for Breast Density Classification: A Real-World Implementation

3 Sep 2020 · Holger R. Roth, Ken Chang, Praveer Singh, Nir Neumark, Wenqi Li, Vikash Gupta, Sharut Gupta, Liangqiong Qu, Alvin Ihsani, Bernardo C. Bizzo, Yuhong Wen, Varun Buch, Meesam Shah, Felipe Kitamura, Matheus Mendonça, Vitor Lavor, Ahmed Harouni, Colin Compas, Jesse Tetreault, Prerna Dogra, Yan Cheng, Selnur Erdal, Richard White, Behrooz Hashemian, Thomas Schultz, Miao Zhang, Adam McCarthy, B. Min Yun, Elshaimaa Sharaf, Katharina V. Hoebel, Jay B. Patel, Bryan Chen, Sean Ko, Evan Leibovitz, Etta D. Pisano, Laura Coombs, Daguang Xu, Keith J. Dreyer, Ittai Dayan, Ram C. Naidu, Mona Flores, Daniel Rubin, Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer ·

Building robust deep learning-based models requires large quantities of diverse training data. In this study, we investigate the use of federated learning (FL) to build medical imaging classification models in a real-world collaborative setting. Seven clinical institutions from across the world joined this FL effort to train a model for breast density classification based on Breast Imaging, Reporting & Data System (BI-RADS). We show that despite substantial differences among the datasets from all sites (mammography system, class distribution, and data set size) and without centralizing data, we can successfully train AI models in federation. The results show that models trained using FL perform 6.3% on average better than their counterparts trained on an institute's local data alone. Furthermore, we show a 45.8% relative improvement in the models' generalizability when evaluated on the other participating sites' testing data.

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