Orbital learning: a novel, actively orchestrated decentralised learning for healthcare

Abstract

Abstract A novel collaborative and continual learning across a network of decentralised healthcare units, avoiding identifiable data-sharing capacity, is proposed. Currently available methodologies, such as federated learning and swarm learning, have demonstrated decentralised learning. However, the majority of them face shortcomings that affect their performance and accuracy. These shortcomings include a non-uniform rate of data accumulation, non-uniform patient demographics, biased human labelling, and erroneous or malicious training data. A novel method to reduce such shortcomings is proposed in the present work through selective grouping and displacing of actors in a network of many entities for intra-group sharing of learning with inter-group accessibility. The proposed system, known as Orbital Learning, incorporates various features from split learning and ensemble learning for a robust and secure performance of supervised models. A digital embodiment of the information quality and flow within a decentralised network, this platform also acts as a digital twin of healthcare network. An example of ECG classification for arrhythmia with 6 clients is used to analyse its performance and is compared against federated learning. In this example, four separate experiments are conducted with varied configurations, such as varied age demographics and clients with data tampering. The results obtained show an average area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.819 (95% CI 0.784–0.853) for orbital learning whereas 0.714 (95% CI 0.692–0.736) for federated learning. This result shows an increase in overall performance and establishes that the proposed system can address the majority of the issues faced by existing decentralised learning methodologies. Further, a scalability demo conducted establishes the versatility and scalability of this platform in handling state-of-the-art large language models.

Keywords

• Decentralised learning
• Digital health
• Data security
• Data privacy