Privacy-preserving medical image analysis

• Main Authors: Ziller, Alexander, Passerat-Palmbach, Jonathan, Ryffel, Théo, Usynin, Dmitrii, Trask, Andrew, Junior, Ionésio Da Lima Costa, Mancuso, Jason, Makowski, Marcus, Rueckert, Daniel, Braren, Rickmer, Kaissis, Georgios
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 10.12.2020
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Computer Science - Cryptography and Security; Computer Science - Learning
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2012.06354

The utilisation of artificial intelligence in medicine and healthcare has led to successful clinical applications in several domains. The conflict between data usage and privacy protection requirements in such systems must be resolved for optimal results as well as ethical and legal compliance. This calls for innovative solutions such as privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML). We present PriMIA (Privacy-preserving Medical Image Analysis), a software framework designed for PPML in medical imaging. In a real-life case study we demonstrate significantly better classification performance of a securely aggregated federated learning model compared to human experts on unseen datasets. Furthermore, we show an inference-as-a-service scenario for end-to-end encrypted diagnosis, where neither the data nor the model are revealed. Lastly, we empirically evaluate the framework's security against a gradient-based model inversion attack and demonstrate that no usable information can be recovered from the model.