Advancing Healthcare Analytics: The Role of Federated Learning and Explainability in Ensuring Data Privacy and Security

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Bioelectronics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 March 2025 | Viewed by 2631

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 621301, Taiwan
Interests: machine learning; federated learning; sustainability; optimization techniques

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Guest Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Federated learning and explainability are two emerging technologies that have the potential to revolutionize healthcare analytics by enabling secure and privacy-preserving collaboration between multiple healthcare institutions. This Special Issue aims to explore the role of these technologies in advancing healthcare analytics and ensuring data privacy and security. We welcome original research and innovative ideas on how federated learning can be used to collaborate effectively and efficiently in a distributed healthcare environment. We also invite submissions that examine the potential of explainability in healthcare analytics, particularly in the areas of transparency, fairness, and accuracy. The goal is to provide a platform for researchers, clinicians, and practitioners to share their insights and experiences on how these technologies can be harnessed to improve healthcare management and better livelihood, while safeguarding patient privacy and data security. We invite high-quality submissions that demonstrate state-of-the-art applications of federated learning and explainability in healthcare analytics and explore new research directions for advancing these technologies in the field of healthcare management engineering.

Topics:

The topics of interest include but are not limited to Advancing Healthcare Analytics: The Role of Federated Learning and Explainability in Ensuring Data Privacy and Security in the following research scope.

  1. Federated learning techniques for healthcare data management;
  2. Explainability in healthcare analytics: methods and applications;
  3. Federated-learning-based predictive modeling for personalized medicine;
  4. Privacy-preserving machine learning for healthcare analytics;
  5. Federated learning for medical imaging analysis;
  6. Explainable deep learning for healthcare data analysis;
  7. Secure and privacy-preserving federated learning for healthcare fraud detection;
  8. Federated-learning-based disease surveillance and outbreak prediction;
  9. Explainability and accountability in AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment planning;
  10. Federated-learning-based clinical trial design and analysis;
  11. Explainable AI for clinical decision support systems;
  12. Federated learning and explainability in health information exchange and interoperability;
  13. Ethical considerations in federated learning and explainability for healthcare management;
  14. Challenges and opportunities in deploying federated learning and explainability in healthcare settings;
  15. Real-world applications and case studies of federated learning and explainability in healthcare analytics.

Technical Program Committee Member:
Name: Prof. Dr. Satheesh Abimannan
Email: [email protected]
Affiliation: School Engineering and Technology, Amity University, Mumbai 410206, India
Research Interests: deep learning; federated learning; cybersecurity; data analytics

Dr. John Ayeelyan
Prof. Dr. George A. Tsihrintzis
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • federated learning
  • explainability
  • healthcare analytics
  • data privacy and security

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 853 KiB  
Article
Decoding Pollution: A Federated Learning-Based Pollution Prediction Study with Health Ramifications Using Causal Inferences
by Snehlata Beriwal and John Ayeelyan
Electronics 2025, 14(2), 350; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14020350 - 17 Jan 2025
Viewed by 569
Abstract
Unprecedented levels of air pollution in our cities due to rapid urbanization have caused major health concerns, severely affecting the population, especially children and the elderly. A steady loss of ecological balance, without remedial measures like phytoremediation, coupled with alarming vehicular and industrial [...] Read more.
Unprecedented levels of air pollution in our cities due to rapid urbanization have caused major health concerns, severely affecting the population, especially children and the elderly. A steady loss of ecological balance, without remedial measures like phytoremediation, coupled with alarming vehicular and industrial pollution, have pushed the Air Quality Index (AQI) and particulate matter (PM) to dangerous levels, especially in the metropolitan cities of India. Monitoring and accurate prediction of inhalable Particulate Matter 2.5 (PM2.5) and Particulate Matter 10 (PM10) levels, which cause escalations in and increase the risks of asthma, respiratory inflammation, bronchitis, high blood pressure, compromised lung function, and lung cancer, have become more critical than ever. To that end, the authors of this work have proposed a federated learning (FL) framework for monitoring and predicting PM2.5 and PM10 across multiple locations, with a resultant impact analysis with respect to key health parameters. The proposed FL approach encompasses four stages: client selection for processing and model updates, aggregation for global model updates, a pollution prediction model with necessary explanations, and finally, the health impact analysis corresponding to the PM levels. This framework employs a VGG-19 deep learning model, and leverages Causal Inference for interpretability, enabling accurate impact analysis across a host of health conditions. This research has employed datasets specific to India, Nepal, and China for the purposes of model prediction, explanation, and impact analysis. The approach was found to achieve an overall accuracy of 92.33%, with the causal inference-based impact analysis producing an accuracy of 84% for training and 72% for testing with respect to PM2.5, and an accuracy of 79% for training and 74% for testing with respect to PM10. Compared to previous studies undertaken in this field, this proposed approach has demonstrated better accuracy, and is the first of its kind to analyze health impacts corresponding to PM2.5 and PM10 levels. Full article
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14 pages, 1956 KiB  
Article
Secure and Efficient Federated Learning Schemes for Healthcare Systems
by Cheng Song, Zhichao Wang, Weiping Peng and Nannan Yang
Electronics 2024, 13(13), 2620; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13132620 - 4 Jul 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1242
Abstract
The swift advancement in communication technology alongside the rise of the Medical Internet of Things (IoT) has spurred the extensive adoption of diverse sensor-driven healthcare and monitoring systems. While the rapid development of healthcare systems is underway, concerns about the privacy leakage of [...] Read more.
The swift advancement in communication technology alongside the rise of the Medical Internet of Things (IoT) has spurred the extensive adoption of diverse sensor-driven healthcare and monitoring systems. While the rapid development of healthcare systems is underway, concerns about the privacy leakage of medical data have also attracted attention. Federated learning plays a certain protective role in data, but studies have shown that gradient transmission under federated learning environments still leads to privacy leakage. Therefore, we proposed secure and efficient federated learning schemes for smart healthcare systems. In this scheme, we used Paillier encryption technology to encrypt the shared training models on the client side, ensuring the security and privacy of the training models. Meanwhile, we designed a zero-knowledge identity authentication module to verify the authenticity of clients participating in the training process. Second, we designed a gradient filtering compression algorithm to eliminate locally updated gradients that were irrelevant to the convergence trend and used computationally negligible compression operators to quantize updates, thereby improving communication efficiency while ensuring model accuracy. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme not only had high model accuracy but also had significant advantages in communication overhead compared with existing schemes. Full article
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