CEPerFed: Communication-Efficient Personalized Federated Learning for Multi-Pulse MRI Classification

TL;DR

CEPerFed is a novel federated learning approach that enhances multi-pulse MRI classification by reducing communication costs and addressing data heterogeneity through client-side gradients and hierarchical SVD.

Contribution

It introduces a communication-efficient personalized federated learning method combining client-side gradients and hierarchical SVD for improved MRI classification.

Findings

Effective in five classification tasks

Reduces communication overhead significantly

Improves convergence stability across heterogeneous data

Abstract

Multi-pulse magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely utilized for clinical practice such as Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. To train a robust model for multi-pulse MRI classification, it requires large and diverse data from various medical institutions while protecting privacy by preventing raw data sharing across institutions. Although federated learning (FL) is a feasible solution to address this issue, it poses challenges of model convergence due to the effect of data heterogeneity and substantial communication overhead due to large numbers of parameters transmitted within the model. To address these challenges, we propose CEPerFed, a communication-efficient personalized FL method. It mitigates the effect of data heterogeneity by incorporating client-side historical risk gradients and historical mean gradients to coordinate local and global optimization. The former is used to weight the contributions from other clients, enhancing the reliability of local updates, while the latter enforces consistency between local updates and the global optimization direction to ensure stable convergence across heterogeneous data distributions. To address the high communication overhead, we propose a hierarchical SVD (HSVD) strategy that transmits only the most critical information required for model updates. Experiments on five classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the CEPerFed method. The code will be released upon acceptance at https://github.com/LD0416/CEPerFed.