Intelligent Handling of Noise in Federated Learning with Co-training for Enhanced Diagnostic Precision

Federated learning (FL) allows multiple distributed clients to train a model while protecting their data. Medical data, especially brain MRIs, might be misdiagnosed due to capture noise and scanner abnormalities. Existing noise-handling technologies use data transmission, raising communication burdens and privacy risks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Adaptive Sample Weighting Federated Learning (ASW-FL) approach incorporating co-training into the FL framework. The local and global models in FL have different learning abilities, which we use to our advantage. The two models “teach each other” to ignore noisy labels by exchanging samples with their confident predictions. Our method improved accuracy from 83.05% to 85.20% using various aggregation algorithms on a benchmark dataset of 1300 brain MRIs and our own Biobank UK data. Our methodology for accurate, privacy-preserving medical image analysis is adequate. The proposed model is precise but requires more processing resources, making it more appropriate for powerful servers than personal devices.