A comparison between centralized and asynchronous federated learning approaches for survival outcome prediction using clinical and PET data from non-small cell lung cancer patients.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Survival analysis plays an essential role in the medical field for optimal treatment decision-making. Recently, survival analysis based on the deep learning (DL) approach has been proposed and is demonstrating promising results. However, developing an ideal prediction model requires integrating large datasets across multiple institutions, which poses challenges concerning medical data privacy. METHODS: In this paper, we propose FedSurv, an asynchronous federated learning (FL) framework designed to predict survival time using clinical information and positron emission tomography (PET)-based features. This study used two datasets: a public radiogenic dataset of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) from the Cancer Imaging Archive (RNSCLC), and an in-house dataset from the Chonnam National University Hwasun Hospital (CNUHH) in South Korea, consisting of clinical risk factors and F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET images in NSCLC patients. Initially, each dataset was divided into multiple clients according to histological attributes, and each client was trained using the proposed DL model to predict individual survival time. The FL framework collected weights and parameters from the clients, which were then incorporated into the global model. Finally, the global model aggregated all weights and parameters and redistributed the updated model weights to each client. We evaluated different frameworks including single-client-based approach, centralized learning and FL. RESULTS: We evaluated our method on two independent datasets. First, on the RNSCLC dataset, the mean absolute error (MAE) was 490.80±22.95 d and the C-Index was 0.69±0.01. Second, on the CNUHH dataset, the MAE was 494.25±40.16 d and the C-Index was 0.71±0.01. The FL approach achieved centralized method performance in PET-based survival time prediction and outperformed single-client-based approaches. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of employing FL for individual survival prediction in NSCLC patients, using clinical information and PET-based features.

Effects of Multiple Filters on Liver Tumor Segmentation From CT Images.

Segmentation of liver tumors from Computerized Tomography (CT) images remains a challenge due to the natural variation in tumor shape and structure as well as the noise in CT images. A key assumption is that the performance of liver tumor segmentation depends on the characteristics of multiple features extracted from multiple filters. In this paper, we design an enhanced approach based on a two-class (liver, tumor) convolutional neural network that discriminates tumor as well as liver from CT images. First, the contrast and intensity values in CT images are adjusted and high frequencies are removed using Hounsfield units (HU) filtering and standardization. Then, the liver tumor is segmented from entire images with multiple filter U-net (MFU-net). Finally, a quantitative analysis is carried out to evaluate the segmentation results using three different methods: boundary-distance-based metrics, size-based metrics, and overlap-based metrics. The proposed method is validated on CT images from the 3Dircadb and LiTS dataset. The results demonstrate that the multiple filters are useful for extracting local and global feature simultaneously, minimizing the boundary distance errors, and our approach demonstrates better performance in heterogeneous tumor regions of CT images.