A Scalable Federated Learning Approach for Collaborative Smart Healthcare Systems With Intermittent Clients Using Medical Imaging

The healthcare industry is one of the most vulnerable to cybercrime and privacy violations because health data is very sensitive and spread out in many places. Recent confidentiality trends and a rising number of infringements in different sectors make it crucial to implement new methods that protect data privacy while maintaining accuracy and sustainability. Moreover, the intermittent nature of remote clients with imbalanced datasets poses a significant obstacle for decentralized healthcare systems. Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized and privacy-protecting approach to deep learning and machine learning models. In this article, we implement a scalable FL framework for interactive smart healthcare systems with intermittent clients using chest X-ray images. Remote hospitals may have imbalanced datasets with intermittent clients communicating with the FL global server. The data augmentation method is used to balance datasets for local model training. In practice, some clients may leave the training process while others join due to technical or connectivity issues. The proposed method is tested with five to eighteen clients and different testing data sizes to evaluate performance in various situations. The experiments show that the proposed FL approach produces competitive results when dealing with two distinct problems, such as intermittent clients and imbalanced data. These findings would encourage medical institutions to collaborate and use rich private data to quickly develop a powerful patient diagnostic model.