Differential privacy for medical deep learning: methods, tradeoffs, and deployment implications

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mohammadi, Marziyeh, Vejdanihemmat, Mohsen, Lotfinia, Mahshad, Rusu, Mirabela, Truhn, Daniel, Maier, Andreas, Arasteh, Soroosh Tayebi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Mohammadi, Marziyeh
Vejdanihemmat, Mohsen
Lotfinia, Mahshad
Rusu, Mirabela
Truhn, Daniel
Maier, Andreas
Arasteh, Soroosh Tayebi
author_facet Mohammadi, Marziyeh
Vejdanihemmat, Mohsen
Lotfinia, Mahshad
Rusu, Mirabela
Truhn, Daniel
Maier, Andreas
Arasteh, Soroosh Tayebi
contents Differential privacy (DP) is a key technique for protecting sensitive patient data in medical deep learning (DL). As clinical models grow more data-dependent, balancing privacy with utility and fairness has become a critical challenge. This scoping review synthesizes recent developments in applying DP to medical DL, with a particular focus on DP-SGD and alternative mechanisms across centralized and federated settings. Using a structured search strategy, we identified 74 studies published up to March 2025. Our analysis spans diverse data modalities, training setups, and downstream tasks, and highlights the tradeoffs between privacy guarantees, model accuracy, and subgroup fairness. We find that while DP-especially at strong privacy budgets-can preserve performance in well-structured imaging tasks, severe degradation often occurs under strict privacy, particularly in underrepresented or complex modalities. Furthermore, privacy-induced performance gaps disproportionately affect demographic subgroups, with fairness impacts varying by data type and task. A small subset of studies explicitly addresses these tradeoffs through subgroup analysis or fairness metrics, but most omit them entirely. Beyond DP-SGD, emerging approaches leverage alternative mechanisms, generative models, and hybrid federated designs, though reporting remains inconsistent. We conclude by outlining key gaps in fairness auditing, standardization, and evaluation protocols, offering guidance for future work toward equitable and clinically robust privacy-preserving DL systems in medicine.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differential privacy for medical deep learning: methods, tradeoffs, and deployment implications
Mohammadi, Marziyeh
Vejdanihemmat, Mohsen
Lotfinia, Mahshad
Rusu, Mirabela
Truhn, Daniel
Maier, Andreas
Arasteh, Soroosh Tayebi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Differential privacy (DP) is a key technique for protecting sensitive patient data in medical deep learning (DL). As clinical models grow more data-dependent, balancing privacy with utility and fairness has become a critical challenge. This scoping review synthesizes recent developments in applying DP to medical DL, with a particular focus on DP-SGD and alternative mechanisms across centralized and federated settings. Using a structured search strategy, we identified 74 studies published up to March 2025. Our analysis spans diverse data modalities, training setups, and downstream tasks, and highlights the tradeoffs between privacy guarantees, model accuracy, and subgroup fairness. We find that while DP-especially at strong privacy budgets-can preserve performance in well-structured imaging tasks, severe degradation often occurs under strict privacy, particularly in underrepresented or complex modalities. Furthermore, privacy-induced performance gaps disproportionately affect demographic subgroups, with fairness impacts varying by data type and task. A small subset of studies explicitly addresses these tradeoffs through subgroup analysis or fairness metrics, but most omit them entirely. Beyond DP-SGD, emerging approaches leverage alternative mechanisms, generative models, and hybrid federated designs, though reporting remains inconsistent. We conclude by outlining key gaps in fairness auditing, standardization, and evaluation protocols, offering guidance for future work toward equitable and clinically robust privacy-preserving DL systems in medicine.
title Differential privacy for medical deep learning: methods, tradeoffs, and deployment implications
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00660