Federated Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Privacy-Preserving Approach to Enhanced ECG Classification

In response to increasing data privacy regulations, this work examines the use of federated learning for deep residual networks to diagnose cardiac abnormalities from electrocardiogram (ECG) data. This approach allows medical institutions to collaborate without exchanging raw patient data. We utilize the publicly available data from the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2021, featuring diverse ECG databases, to compare the classification performance of three federated learning methods against both central training with data sharing and isolated training scenarios. We show that federated learning outperforms ECG classifiers trained in isolation. In particular, our findings demonstrate that a globally trained model fine-tuned to specific local datasets surpasses non-collaborative approaches. This shows that models trained in federation learn general features that can be tailored to specific tasks. Furthermore, federated learning almost matches the performance of central training with data sharing on out-of-distribution data from non-participating institutions. These results highlight the ability of federated learning in developing models that generalize well across diverse patient data, without the need to share data among institutions, thus addressing data privacy concerns.