A federated multimodal deep learning framework for brain tumor classification using MRI

Introduction: Brain tumor classification using MRI plays a critical role in early diagnosis and treatment planning. However, traditional centralized approaches require sharing sensitive medical data, which raises serious privacy concerns. Additionally, the distribution of data across multiple hospitals limits effective model training and utilization. Therefore, there is a strong need for privacy-preserving and distributed learning methods that ensure both security and accuracy in classification. Methods: In this work, a federated learning framework is proposed to enable collaborative model training without sharing raw data. To improve efficiency, a layer skipping mechanism is applied, which reduces communication cost during training. The FedPropSAG aggregation method is used to enhance convergence and overall model performance. Furthermore, Differential Privacy (DP) and Secure Aggregation (SA) techniques are incorporated to ensure data privacy and secure communication. Results: The proposed model achieves high classification accuracy across distributed datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness. The communication cost is significantly reduced due to the implementation of the layer skipping mechanism. The model performs well even under non-IID data distributions, which are common in real-world scenarios. Importantly, the integration of privacy-preserving techniques does not degrade the overall model performance. Discussion: The proposed approach provides an efficient and scalable solution for distributed medical data analysis. It ensures patient data privacy while still enabling collaborative learning across multiple institutions. The reduction in communication overhead makes the framework suitable for practical deployment in healthcare systems. Overall, the model successfully balances accuracy, efficiency, and privacy, making it a strong candidate for real-world applications.