A novel federated deep learning scheme for glioma and its subtype classification

Background Deep learning (DL) has shown promising results in molecular-based classification of glioma subtypes from MR images. DL requires a large number of training data for achieving good generalization performance. Since brain tumor datasets are usually small in size, combination of such datasets from different hospitals are needed. Data privacy issue from hospitals often poses a constraint on such a practice. Federated learning (FL) has gained much attention lately as it trains a central DL model without requiring data sharing from different hospitals. Method We propose a novel 3D FL scheme for glioma and its molecular subtype classification. In the scheme, a slice-based DL classifier, EtFedDyn, is exploited which is an extension of FedDyn, with the key differences on using focal loss cost function to tackle severe class imbalances in the datasets, and on multi-stream network to exploit MRIs in different modalities. By combining EtFedDyn with domain mapping as the pre-processing and 3D scan-based post-processing, the proposed scheme makes 3D brain scan-based classification on datasets from different dataset owners. To examine whether the FL scheme could replace the central learning (CL) one, we then compare the classification performance between the proposed FL and the corresponding CL schemes. Furthermore, detailed empirical-based analysis were also conducted to exam the effect of using domain mapping, 3D scan-based post-processing, different cost functions and different FL schemes. Results Experiments were done on two case studies: classification of glioma subtypes (IDH mutation and wild-type on TCGA and US datasets in case A) and glioma grades (high/low grade glioma HGG and LGG on MICCAI dataset in case B). The proposed FL scheme has obtained good performance on the test sets (85.46%, 75.56%) for IDH subtypes and (89.28%, 90.72%) for glioma LGG/HGG all averaged on five runs. Comparing with the corresponding CL scheme, the drop in test accuracy from the proposed FL scheme is small (−1.17%, −0.83%), indicating its good potential to replace the CL scheme. Furthermore, the empirically tests have shown that an increased classification test accuracy by applying: domain mapping (0.4%, 1.85%) in case A; focal loss function (1.66%, 3.25%) in case A and (1.19%, 1.85%) in case B; 3D post-processing (2.11%, 2.23%) in case A and (1.81%, 2.39%) in case B and EtFedDyn over FedAvg classifier (1.05%, 1.55%) in case A and (1.23%, 1.81%) in case B with fast convergence, which all contributed to the improvement of overall performance in the proposed FL scheme. Conclusion The proposed FL scheme is shown to be effective in predicting glioma and its subtypes by using MR images from test sets, with great potential of replacing the conventional CL approaches for training deep networks. This could help hospitals to maintain their data privacy, while using a federated trained classifier with nearly similar performance as that from a centrally trained one. Further detailed experiments have shown that different parts in the proposed 3D FL scheme, such as domain mapping (make datasets more uniform) and post-processing (scan-based classification), are essential.