Introduction and Comparison of Novel Decentral Learning Schemes with Multiple Data Pools for Privacy-Preserving ECG Classification

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have led to prominent and spectacular innovations in various scenarios. Application in medicine, however, can be challenging due to privacy concerns and strict legal regulations. Methods that centralize knowledge instead of data could address this issue. In this work, 6 different decentralized machine learning algorithms are applied to 12-lead ECG classification and compared to conventional, centralized machine learning. The results show that state-of-the-art federated learning leads to reasonable losses of classification performance compared to a standard, central model (−0.054 AUROC) while providing a significantly higher level of privacy. A proposed weighted variant of federated learning (−0.049 AUROC) and an ensemble (−0.035 AUROC) outperformed the standard federated learning algorithm. Overall, considering multiple metrics, the novel batch-wise sequential learning scheme performed best (−0.036 AUROC to baseline). Although, the technical aspects of implementing them in a real-world application are to be carefully considered, the described algorithms constitute a way forward towards preserving-preserving AI in medicine.