Privacy-Conscious Skin Cancer Diagnosis through Federated Learning and Deep Neural Networks
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By
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Mohammed A. M. Alfalahi
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Oğuz Karan
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Sefer Kurnaz
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Ayça Kurnaz Türkben
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April 27, 2026
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Clinical Scorecard: Privacy-Conscious Skin Cancer Diagnosis through Federated Learning and Deep Neural Networks
At a Glance
| Category | Detail |
| Condition | Skin Cancer |
| Key Mechanisms | Federated Learning (FL) for decentralized model training without data transfer. |
| Target Population | Individuals at risk of skin cancer, particularly melanoma. |
| Care Setting | Distributed healthcare environments. |
Key Highlights
- Federated Learning enables privacy-sensitive skin cancer classification.
- MobileNetV2 achieved 98.88% accuracy, outperforming centralized models.
- Decentralized training reduces communication overhead and enhances performance.
- Framework addresses institutional heterogeneity in clinical data.
- Supports multimodal data integration for improved diagnostic fidelity.
Guideline-Based Recommendations
Diagnosis
- Utilize federated learning models for skin cancer classification.
- Incorporate multimodal data for enhanced diagnostic accuracy.
Management
- Implement privacy-preserving AI solutions in dermatology.
- Encourage collaboration among institutions without data sharing.
Monitoring & Follow-up
- Regularly evaluate model performance across different clinical settings.
- Monitor the impact of non-IID data distributions on model accuracy.
Risks
- Potential for misclassification due to reliance on decentralized data.
- Challenges in maintaining model performance with increasing non-IID severity.
Patient & Prescribing Data
Patients with suspected skin cancer, especially melanoma.
AI-aided diagnosis can lead to earlier detection and personalized treatment plans.
Clinical Best Practices
- Adopt federated learning frameworks to enhance patient privacy.
- Utilize lightweight architectures like MobileNetV2 for efficient model training.
- Encourage the integration of diverse data types for comprehensive diagnostics.
References