A Systematic Review on Federated Learning in Medical Image Analysis

Federated Learning (FL) obtained a lot of attention to the academic and industrial stakeholders from the beginning of its invention. The eye-catching feature of FL is handling data in a decentralized manner which creates a privacy preserving environment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. As we know medical data includes marginal private information of patients which demands excessive data protection from disclosure to unexpected destinations. In this paper, we performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of published research articles on FL based medical image analysis. Firstly, we have collected articles from different databases followed by PRISMA guidelines, then synthesized data from the selected articles, and finally we provided a comprehensive overview on the topic. In order to do that we extracted core information associated with the implementation of FL in medical imaging from the articles. In our findings we briefly presented characteristics of federated data and models, performance achieved by the models and exclusively results comparison with traditional ML models. In addition, we discussed the open issues and challenges of implementing FL and mentioned our recommendations for future direction of this particular research field. We believe this SLR has successfully summarized the state-of-the-art FL methods for medical image analysis using deep learning.