Federated Learning for Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review

Recent advancements in deep learning for healthcare and computer-aided laboratory services have sparked a renewed interest in making medical data more accessible. Elevating the quality of healthcare services and delivering improved patient care necessitates a knowledge base rooted in data-driven insights. Deep learning models have proven to excel in this regard, as they are specifically designed to embrace a data-driven approach. These models thrive on exposure to larger datasets, which enables them to continuously improve their performance. However, as healthcare organizations strive to aggregate clinical records onto central servers to construct robust deep learning models, concerns surrounding privacy, data ownership, and legal restrictions have emerged. Safeguarding sensitive medical data while harnessing collective knowledge from multiple healthcare centers is a challenging balancing act. One promising approach to address these concerns is the use of privacy-preserving techniques that allow for the utilization of data from multiple centers without compromising security. Federated learning (FL) is a technique that has emerged to enable the deployment of large machine learning models trained across multiple data centers without the necessity of sharing sensitive information. In this article, we present the most recent findings derived from a systematic literature review focusing on the application of federated learning in healthcare settings. This review offers insights into the current state of research and practical implementations of FL within the healthcare domain. By leveraging federated learning, healthcare institutions can harness the collective power of their data while upholding privacy and data security standards, ultimately leading to more effective and data-driven healthcare solutions.