FeTTL: Federated Template and Task Learning for Multi-Institutional Medical Imaging

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Parida, Abhijeet, Alomar, Antonia, Jiang, Zhifan, Roshanitabrizi, Pooneh, Tapp, Austin, Xu, Ziyue, Anwar, Syed Muhammad, Ledesma-Carbayo, Maria J., Roth, Holger R., Linguraru, Marius George
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Parida, Abhijeet
Alomar, Antonia
Jiang, Zhifan
Roshanitabrizi, Pooneh
Tapp, Austin
Xu, Ziyue
Anwar, Syed Muhammad
Ledesma-Carbayo, Maria J.
Roth, Holger R.
Linguraru, Marius George
author_facet Parida, Abhijeet
Alomar, Antonia
Jiang, Zhifan
Roshanitabrizi, Pooneh
Tapp, Austin
Xu, Ziyue
Anwar, Syed Muhammad
Ledesma-Carbayo, Maria J.
Roth, Holger R.
Linguraru, Marius George
contents Federated learning enables collaborative model training across geographically distributed medical centers while preserving data privacy. However, domain shifts and heterogeneity in data often lead to a degradation in model performance. Medical imaging applications are particularly affected by variations in acquisition protocols, scanner types, and patient populations. To address these issues, we introduce Federated Template and Task Learning (FeTTL), a novel framework designed to harmonize multi-institutional medical imaging data in federated environments. FeTTL learns a global template together with a task model to align data distributions among clients. We evaluated FeTTL on two challenging and diverse multi-institutional medical imaging tasks: retinal fundus optical disc segmentation and histopathological metastasis classification. Experimental results show that FeTTL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art federated learning baselines (p-values <0.002) for optical disc segmentation and classification of metastases from multi-institutional data. Our experiments further highlight the importance of jointly learning the template and the task. These findings suggest that FeTTL offers a principled and extensible solution for mitigating distribution shifts in federated learning, supporting robust model deployment in real-world, multi-institutional environments.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_16302
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FeTTL: Federated Template and Task Learning for Multi-Institutional Medical Imaging
Parida, Abhijeet
Alomar, Antonia
Jiang, Zhifan
Roshanitabrizi, Pooneh
Tapp, Austin
Xu, Ziyue
Anwar, Syed Muhammad
Ledesma-Carbayo, Maria J.
Roth, Holger R.
Linguraru, Marius George
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Federated learning enables collaborative model training across geographically distributed medical centers while preserving data privacy. However, domain shifts and heterogeneity in data often lead to a degradation in model performance. Medical imaging applications are particularly affected by variations in acquisition protocols, scanner types, and patient populations. To address these issues, we introduce Federated Template and Task Learning (FeTTL), a novel framework designed to harmonize multi-institutional medical imaging data in federated environments. FeTTL learns a global template together with a task model to align data distributions among clients. We evaluated FeTTL on two challenging and diverse multi-institutional medical imaging tasks: retinal fundus optical disc segmentation and histopathological metastasis classification. Experimental results show that FeTTL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art federated learning baselines (p-values <0.002) for optical disc segmentation and classification of metastases from multi-institutional data. Our experiments further highlight the importance of jointly learning the template and the task. These findings suggest that FeTTL offers a principled and extensible solution for mitigating distribution shifts in federated learning, supporting robust model deployment in real-world, multi-institutional environments.
title FeTTL: Federated Template and Task Learning for Multi-Institutional Medical Imaging
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16302