A Client-server Deep Federated Learning for Cross-domain Surgical Image Segmentation

Abstract: This paper presents a solution to the cross-domain adaptation problem for 2D surgical image segmentation, explicitly considering the privacy protection of distributed datasets belonging to different centers. Deep learning architectures in medical image analysis necessitate extensive training data for better generalization. However, obtaining sufficient diagnostic and surgical data is still challenging, mainly due to the inherent cost of data curation and the need of experts for data annotation. Moreover, increased privacy and legal compliance concerns can make data sharing across clinical sites or regions difficult. Another ubiquitous challenge the medical datasets face is inevitable domain shifts among the collected data at the different centers. To this end, we propose a Client-server deep federated architecture for cross-domain adaptation. A server hosts a set of immutable parameters common to both the source and target domains. The clients consist of the respective domain-specific parameters and make requests to the server while learning their parameters and inferencing. We evaluate our framework in two benchmark datasets, demonstrating applicability in computer-assisted interventions for endoscopic polyp segmentation and diagnostic skin lesion detection and analysis. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to competitive baseline and state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at: https://github.com/thetna/distributed-da