Federated Learning for Healthcare Informatics
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Recent rapid development of medical informatization and the corresponding advances of automated data collection in clinical sciences generate large volume of healthcare data. Proper use of these big data is closely related to the perfection of the whole health system, and is of great significance to drug development, health management and public health services. However, in addition to the heterogeneous and highly dimensional data characteristics caused by a spectrum of complex data types ranging from free-text clinical notes to various medical images, the fragmented data sources and privacy concerns of healthcare data are also huge obstacles to multi-institutional healthcare informatics research. Federated learning, a mechanism of training a shared global model with a central server while keeping all the sensitive data in local institutions where the data belong, is a new attempt to connect the scattered healthcare data sources without ignoring the privacy of data. This survey focuses on reviewing the current progress on federated learning including, but not limited to, healthcare informatics. We summarize the general solutions to the statistical challenges, system challenges and privacy issues in federated learning research for reference. By doing the survey, we hope to provide a useful resource for health informatics and computational research on current progress of how to perform machine learning techniques on heterogeneous data scattered in a large volume of institutions while considering the privacy concerns on sharing data.
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