FedEHR: A Federated Learning Approach towards the Prediction of Heart Diseases in IoT-Based Electronic Health Records

Diagnostics (Basel). 2023 Oct 10;13(20):3166. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics13203166.

Abstract

In contemporary healthcare, the prediction and identification of cardiac diseases is crucial. By leveraging the capabilities of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices and Electronic Health Records (EHRs), the healthcare sector can largely benefit to improve patient outcomes by increasing the accuracy of disease prediction. However, protecting data privacy is essential to promote participation and adhere to rules. The suggested methodology combines EHRs with IoT-generated health data to predict heart disease. For its capacity to manage high-dimensional data and choose pertinent features, a soft-margin L1-regularised Support Vector Machine (sSVM) classifier is used. The large-scale sSVM problem is successfully solved using the cluster primal-dual splitting algorithm, which improves computational complexity and scalability. The integration of federated learning provides a cooperative predictive analytics methodology that upholds data privacy. The use of a federated learning framework in this study, with a focus on peer-to-peer applications, is crucial for enabling collaborative predictive modeling while protecting the confidentiality of each participant's private medical information.

Keywords: Electronic Health Records; Internet of Things; federated learning; heart disease prediction; machine learning.

Grants and funding

This research is supported by the Researchers Supporting Project number (PNURSP2023R195), Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.