Feasibility Study on Browser-Based Federated Machine Learning (FML) Architecture for Medical Application

Traditional approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI) based medical image classification requires huge amounts of data sets to be stored in a centralized server for analysis and training. In medical applications, data privacy and ownership may pose a challenge. In addition, costs incurred by data transfer and cloud server may pose a challenge to implementing a large dataset. This work studies the feasibility of a decentralized, browser-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) federated machine learning (FML) architecture. The proposed work studies the feasibility of bringing training and inference to the browser, hence removing the need to transfer raw data to a centralized server. If feasible, the system allows practitioners to compress and upload their pre-trained model to the server instead of raw data. This allows medical practitioners to update the model without the need to reveal their raw data. A sandbox system was implemented by applying transfer learning on MobileNet V3 and was tested with chest X-ray image datasets from COVID-19, viral pneumonia, and normal patients to simulate medical usage environment. The training speed, model performance and inference speed were tested on a PC browser and mobile phone with various levels of network throttling and image degradation.