FedIHRAS: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Framework for Multi-Institutional Collaborative Radiological Analysis with Integrated Explainability and Automated Clinical Reporting
Abstract
The rapid growth of medical imaging data has intensified the need for advanced computational tools to support clinical decision-making. However, centralized approaches to artificial intelligence development raise significant challenges related to privacy, regulation, and generalizability. This paper introduces FedIHRAS (Federated Intelligent Humanized Radiology Analysis System), a privacy-preserving federated learning framework that enables multi-institutional collaboration for chest X-ray analysis. FedIHRAS integrates pathology classification, visual explainability, anatomical segmentation, and automated clinical report generation into a unified system that incorporates adaptive aggregation strategies, heterogeneity, and non-IID distributions. The framework employs multi-layered differential privacy mechanisms and a secure communication infrastructure to ensure compliance with strict healthcare data protection standards. Experimental validation across four large-scale chest radiograph datasets (approximately 874k images) demonstrates that FedIHRAS retains 98.8\% of the diagnostic accuracy of a centralized model (mean AUC-ROC = 0.911 vs. 0.922) and achieves superior generalization to unseen institutions (94.2\% retention). Explainability and interpretability were preserved at near-centralized levels, with expert radiologists rating 94.6\% of attention maps as clinically reliable. Moreover, privacy robustness tests confirm strong resistance against inference and reconstruction attacks. FedIHRAS reduces barriers to collaborative research and mitigates algorithmic bias, ultimately offering a scalable and equitable solution for radiological analysis in real-world healthcare systems.
Fields of Study & Subjects
COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
AI in cancer detection
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Preprints.org
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Publication date
- 23 February 2026
- Document type
- Preprint