STM Journals Peer-reviewed research from Consortium e-Learning Network

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research & Advances Original Research

Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving AI Model Training Across Distributed Healthcare Systems

  1. Waris Sarwar Imam AlKabir Institute of Technology and Management
  2. Nushrat Praveen AlKabir Institute of Technology and Management
  3. Chandana Kumari AlKabir Institute of Technology and Management

Abstract

Building effective AI diagnostic tools in clinical environments presents a fundamental contradiction — the patient data most critical to model performance is precisely the data subject to the strictest legal and institutional restrictions. Regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR, while essential for protecting patient rights, render conventional centralized training pipelines largely impractical in real hospital settings where data cannot be transferred, pooled, or shared across institutional boundaries. This paper presents a federated learning framework specifically engineered to resolve that contradiction, enabling AI diagnostic models to be trained collaboratively across distributed hospital networks without any raw patient records leaving their origin systems. Unlike approaches that treat privacy as a compliance checkbox, the proposed design embeds differential privacy mechanisms and secure multi-party computation directly into the core training architecture, treating them as structural requirements rather than optional additions. An adaptive gradient aggregation strategy was further developed to manage the statistical heterogeneity that inevitably arises when training data originates from hospitals with meaningfully different patient demographics, equipment standards, and clinical documentation practices. The framework was evaluated across three clinically relevant tasks — chest X-ray pathology classification, diabetic retinopathy grading, and clinical note summarization — distributed across ten simulated hospital nodes of varying data volume and feature distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the federated model achieved performance within 2.3% of a centrally trained baseline on all three tasks, while reducing measurable privacy leakage by over 94% as assessed through membership inference attack protocols.

Keywords

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