This blog post is co-written with Chaoyang He and Salman Avestimehr from FedML.
Analyzing real-world healthcare and life sciences (HCLS) data poses several practical challenges, such as distributed data silos, lack of sufficient data at a single site for rare events, regulatory guidelines that prohibit data sharing, infrastructure requirement, and cost incurred in creating a centralized data repository. Because they’re in a highly regulated domain, HCLS partners and customers seek privacy-preserving mechanisms to manage and analyze large-scale, distributed, and sensitive data.
To mitigate these challenges, we propose a federated learning (FL) framework, based on open-source FedML on AWS, which enables analyzing sensitive HCLS data. It involves training a global machine learning (ML) model from distributed health data held locally at different sites. It doesn’t require moving or sharing data across sites or with a centralized server during the model training process.
Deploying an FL framework on the cloud has several

Continue reading