FedGS: Federated Gradient Scaling for Heterogeneous Medical Image Segmentation
This addresses privacy-preserving collaborative training in medical imaging, but it is incremental as it builds on existing disentangled representation learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of data heterogeneity in federated learning for medical image segmentation, particularly for small lesions, by proposing FedGS, which improves segmentation performance over FedAvg on datasets like PolypGen and LiTS.
Federated Learning (FL) in Deep Learning (DL)-automated medical image segmentation helps preserving privacy by enabling collaborative model training without sharing patient data. However, FL faces challenges with data heterogeneity among institutions, leading to suboptimal global models. Integrating Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) in FL can enhance robustness by separating data into distinct representations. Existing DRL methods assume heterogeneity lies solely in style features, overlooking content-based variability like lesion size and shape. We propose FedGS, a novel FL aggregation method, to improve segmentation performance on small, under-represented targets while maintaining overall efficacy. FedGS demonstrates superior performance over FedAvg, particularly for small lesions, across PolypGen and LiTS datasets. The code and pre-trained checkpoints are available at the following link: https://github.com/Trustworthy-AI-UU-NKI/Federated-Learning-Disentanglement