A novel federated learning framework for medical imaging: Resource‐efficient approach combining PCA with early stopping

Abstract Background Federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborative model training across multiple institutions while preserving privacy by avoiding the sharing of raw data, a critical consideration in medical imaging applications. Despite its potential, FL faces challenges such as high‐dimensional data, heterogeneity among datasets from different centers, and resource constraints, which limit its efficiency and effectiveness in healthcare settings. Purpose This study aims to present a novel adaptive FL framework to address the challenges of data heterogeneity and resource constraints in medical imaging. The proposed framework is designed to optimize computational efficiency, enhance training processes, improve model performance, and ensure robustness against non‐independent and identically distributed (non‐IID) data across decentralized data sources. Methods The proposed adaptive FL framework addresses the challenges of high‐dimensional data and heterogeneity in nonuniform and decentralized data sources through a key innovation. First, Federated incremental principal component analysis (FIPCA) achieves privacy‐preserving dimensionality reduction by aggregating local scatter matrices and means from participating centers, enabling the computation of a global PCA model. This process ensures data alignment across centers, mitigates heterogeneity, and significantly reduces computational complexity. We evaluated the framework's ability to generalize across institutions in a cross‐site classification task distinguishing clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) from non‐csPCa. This assessment used 1500 T2‐weighted (T2W) prostate MRI images from three institutions, where two centers (800 + 350 cases) were used for training and validation, and one center (350 cases) served as an independent test site. Results The proposed method significantly reduced the number of global training rounds from 200 to 38, achieving a 98% reduction in energy consumption compared to the standard FedAvg algorithm. The effective use of FIPCA for dimensionality reduction enhanced generalizability, while adaptive early stopping prevented overfitting, leading to an improvement in model performance, with the area under the curve (AUC) on the unseen test center increasing from 0.68 to 0.73 (95 % CI 0.70 – 0.77) on the test center's data. Additionally, the method demonstrated improved sensitivity and specificity, indicating superior classification performance. The integration of FIPCA accelerated convergence by reducing data dimensionality, while the adaptive early‐stopping mechanism further optimized resource utilization and prevented overfitting. Conclusions Our adaptive FL approach efficiently handles large, heterogeneous medical imaging data, reducing training time and computational overhead, while improving model accuracy. The substantial reduction in energy consumption and accelerated convergence make it suitable for real‐world healthcare settings.