Federated Learning for Thoracic Disease Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Differential Privacy.

= 1, 15 and 30). Experimental results on the CheXpert and NIH Chest x-ray14 datasets demonstrate that the proposed EfficientNet-B3-based federated model achieves a mean AUC of 0.8027, while maintaining robustness across decentralized settings. The integration of DP leads to a predictable reduction in performance, with mean AUC ranging from 0.60 to 0.64, highlighting the inherent trade-off between privacy and diagnostic accuracy. The findings emphasize the practical viability of FL for privacy-sensitive medical imaging applications and provide insights into model selection, scalability and privacy configuration for real-world deployment. The source code for this study is publicly accessible at https://github.com/Zulqarnain8-8/FEDERATED_LEARNING_FOR_THORACIC_DISEASE_CLASSIFICATION.