Federated Deep Learning for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Analysis: Enabling Collaboration Across Multiple Data Centers for Robust Learning of Diverse Pathologies

Abstract

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a revolutionary diagnostic method for small bowel pathology. The manual perusal of the resulting lengthy and redundant videos is cumbersome. Automated analysis of WCE video frames is an intricate data modeling task because of the diverse representations of anomalies caused by inappropriate capture conditions. Deep neural networks require training to learn diverse pathological manifestations utilizing heterogeneous data collected from multiple institutions. However, the accessibility of WCE data poses privacy concerns for multiple centers. The efficient learning of heterogeneous data distributed over multiple institutions in a privacy-preserving fashion has become a challenge hampering the adoption of AI-based diagnoses in clinical practice. Prior studies have contrived extensive data augmentation and the generation of synthetic images from the same center. However, models trained at one center are at risk of a lack of generalization for a global deployment. Federated learning (FL) is a novel paradigm in which models learn from distributed data and share knowledge without accessing the data themselves. This study proposes an FL framework for multiple anomaly classifications of WCE frames, elaborating on the potential of collaborative learning from multiple data centers on the edge. Our empirical results prove that the proposed decentralized approach can learn the generalized features of WCE frames. Validating heterogeneous test sets revealed a 10–12% improvement in performance for decentralized models based on FL compared to the best-case performance of centralized models, demonstrating the potential of the federated framework to support multiple anomaly classification of WCE frames while preserving data privacy across various clinical setups.