FedSODA: Federated Cross-assessment and Dynamic Aggregation for Histopathology Segmentation
This work addresses federated learning for histopathology segmentation, a domain-specific problem for medical diagnosis, with incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenges of sample imbalance and data heterogeneity in federated learning for histopathology image segmentation by proposing FedSODA, which uses synthetic-driven cross-assessment and dynamic stratified-layer aggregation, achieving state-of-the-art results on a dataset from 7 independent datasets.
Federated learning (FL) for histopathology image segmentation involving multiple medical sites plays a crucial role in advancing the field of accurate disease diagnosis and treatment. However, it is still a task of great challenges due to the sample imbalance across clients and large data heterogeneity from disparate organs, variable segmentation tasks, and diverse distribution. Thus, we propose a novel FL approach for histopathology nuclei and tissue segmentation, FedSODA, via synthetic-driven cross-assessment operation (SO) and dynamic stratified-layer aggregation (DA). Our SO constructs a cross-assessment strategy to connect clients and mitigate the representation bias under sample imbalance. Our DA utilizes layer-wise interaction and dynamic aggregation to diminish heterogeneity and enhance generalization. The effectiveness of our FedSODA has been evaluated on the most extensive histopathology image segmentation dataset from 7 independent datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanzhang7/FedSODA.