Multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation: revisiting weighting mechanisms for federated learning

Background and introductionFederated learning (FL) has been widely employed for medical image analysis to facilitate multi-client collaborative learning without sharing raw data. Despite great success, FL's applications remain suboptimal in neuroimage analysis tasks such as lesion segmentation in multiple sclerosis (MS), due to variance in lesion characteristics imparted by different scanners and acquisition parameters. MethodsIn this work, we propose the first FL MS lesion segmentation framework via two effective re-weighting mechanisms. Specifically, a learnable weight is assigned to each local node during the aggregation process, based on its segmentation performance. In addition, the segmentation loss function in each client is also re-weighted according to the lesion volume for the data during training. ResultsThe proposed method has been validated on two FL MS segmentation scenarios using public and clinical datasets. Specifically, the case-wise and voxel-wise Dice score of the proposed method under the first public dataset is 65.20 and 74.30, respectively. On the second in-house dataset, the case-wise and voxel-wise Dice score is 53.66, and 62.31, respectively. Discussions and conclusionsThe Comparison experiments on two FL MS segmentation scenarios using public and clinical datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method by significantly outperforming other FL methods. Furthermore, the segmentation performance of FL incorporating our proposed aggregation mechanism can achieve comparable performance to that from centralized training with all the raw data.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a Federated Learning (FL) framework for multiple sclerosis (MS) lesion segmentation, applying two effective re-weighting mechanisms to address the challenges in FL's applications in neuroimage analysis tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other FL methods, and the segmentation performance of FL incorporating the proposed aggregation mechanism can achieve comparable performance to that from centralized training with all the raw data.