Chronic diabetes can lead to microvascular complications, including diabetic eye disease, diabetic kidney disease, and diabetic neuropathy. However, the long-term complications often remain undetected at the early stages of diagnosis. Developing a machine learning model to identify the patients at high risk of developing diabetes-related complications can help design better treatment interventions. Building robust machine learning models require large datasets which further requires sharing data among different healthcare systems, hence, involving privacy and confidentiality concerns. The main objective of this study is to design a decentralized privacy-protected federated learning architecture that can deliver comparable performance to centralized learning. We demonstrate the potential of adopting federated learning to address the challenges such as class-imbalance in using real-world clinical data. In all our experiments, federated learning showed comparable performance to the gold-standard of centralized learning, and applying class balancing techniques improved performance across all cohorts.
©2021 AMIA - All rights reserved.