Application of federated learning techniques for arrhythmia classification using 12-lead ECG signals

Background: AI-based analysis of sufficiently large, curated medical datasets has been shown to be promising for providing early detection, faster diagnosis, better decision-making, and more effective treatment. However, accessing such highly confidential and very sensitive medical data, obtained from a variety of sources, is usually highly restricted since improper use, unsafe storage, data leakage or abuse could violate a person's privacy. In this work we apply a federated learning paradigm over a heterogeneous, siloed sets of high-definition electrocardiogram arriving from 12-leads ECG sensors arrays to train AI models. We evaluated the capacity of the resulting models to achieve equivalent performance when compared to state-of-the-art models trained when the same data is collected in a central place. Methods: We propose a privacy preserving methodology for training AI models based on the federated learning paradigm over a heterogeneous, distributed, dataset. The methodology is applied to a broad range of machine learning techniques based on gradient boosting, convolutional neural network and recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory. The models were trained over a ECG dataset containing 12-leads recordings collected from 43,059 patients from six geographically separate and heterogeneous sources. Findings: The resulting set of AI models for detecting cardiovascular abnormalities achieved comparable predictive performances against models trained using a centralised learning approach. Interpretation: The approach of compute parameters contributing to the global model locally and then exchange only such parameters instead of the whole sensitive data as in ML contributes to preserve medical data privacy.