Integrated CNN and Federated Learning for COVID-19 Detection on Chest X-Ray Images

Currently, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still endangering world health and safety and deep learning (DL) is expected to be the most powerful method for efficient detection of COVID-19. However, patients’ privacy concerns prohibit data sharing between medical institutions, leading to unexpected performance of deep neural network (DNN) models. Fortunately, federated learning (FL), as a novel paradigm, allows participating clients to collaboratively train models without exposing source data outside original location. Nevertheless, the current FL-based COVID-19 detection methods prefer optimizing secondary objectives including delay, energy consumption and privacy, while few works focus on improving the model accuracy and stability. In this paper, we propose a federated learning framework with dynamic focus for COVID-19 detection on CXR images, named FedFocus. Specifically, to improve the training efficiency and accuracy, the training loss of each model is taken as the basis for parameter aggregation weights. As training layer deepens, a constantly updated dynamic factor is designed to stabilize the aggregation process. In addition, to highly restore the real dataset, the training sets in our experiments are divided based on the population and the infection of three real cities. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world CXR images dataset demonstrate that FedFocus outperforms the baselines in model training efficiency, accuracy and stability.