Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning via Differential Privacy and Homomorphic Encryption for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sharma, Gaurang, Pajula, Juha, Illikainen, Aada, Rautell, Markus, Lipsonen, Noora, Alhainen, Petri, Hilvo, Mika
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sharma, Gaurang
Pajula, Juha
Illikainen, Aada
Rautell, Markus
Lipsonen, Noora
Alhainen, Petri
Hilvo, Mika
author_facet Sharma, Gaurang
Pajula, Juha
Illikainen, Aada
Rautell, Markus
Lipsonen, Noora
Alhainen, Petri
Hilvo, Mika
contents Protecting sensitive health data while enabling collaborative analysis is a central challenge in healthcare. Traditional machine learning (ML) requires institutions to pool anonymized patient records, centralizing analytical development and privacy risks at a single site. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including Differential Privacy (DP) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE), can mitigate these risks. However, they are mainly studied in conventional data-sharing settings and often introduce trade-offs, including reduced model utility, higher computational cost, and increased implementation complexity. Federated Learning (FL) reduces data centralization by enabling institutions to train models locally and share only model updates. Nevertheless, FL does not eliminate privacy risks, as shared parameters or gradients may still reveal sensitive information. Integrating DP or HE into FL can strengthen privacy guarantees, yet their comparative performance and deployment implications in real-world healthcare settings remain unclear. We systematically evaluated DP and HE integration in FL under real-world conditions, comparing them with standard FL and centralized ML (cML) to quantify privacy-utility trade-offs in multi-institutional settings. Using nationwide Swedish healthcare data, we evaluated cardiovascular disease risk prediction using logistic regression (LR) and neural network (NN) learners. FL with HE achieved performance comparable to cML but introduced measurable cryptographic overhead, particularly in the NN implementation. FL with DP incurred lower computational cost; however, LR was more sensitive to calibrated noise than the NN, resulting in greater performance degradation. Our findings provide practical guidance for deploying privacy-preserving FL in fragmented healthcare systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27598
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning via Differential Privacy and Homomorphic Encryption for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Modeling
Sharma, Gaurang
Pajula, Juha
Illikainen, Aada
Rautell, Markus
Lipsonen, Noora
Alhainen, Petri
Hilvo, Mika
Machine Learning
Protecting sensitive health data while enabling collaborative analysis is a central challenge in healthcare. Traditional machine learning (ML) requires institutions to pool anonymized patient records, centralizing analytical development and privacy risks at a single site. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including Differential Privacy (DP) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE), can mitigate these risks. However, they are mainly studied in conventional data-sharing settings and often introduce trade-offs, including reduced model utility, higher computational cost, and increased implementation complexity. Federated Learning (FL) reduces data centralization by enabling institutions to train models locally and share only model updates. Nevertheless, FL does not eliminate privacy risks, as shared parameters or gradients may still reveal sensitive information. Integrating DP or HE into FL can strengthen privacy guarantees, yet their comparative performance and deployment implications in real-world healthcare settings remain unclear. We systematically evaluated DP and HE integration in FL under real-world conditions, comparing them with standard FL and centralized ML (cML) to quantify privacy-utility trade-offs in multi-institutional settings. Using nationwide Swedish healthcare data, we evaluated cardiovascular disease risk prediction using logistic regression (LR) and neural network (NN) learners. FL with HE achieved performance comparable to cML but introduced measurable cryptographic overhead, particularly in the NN implementation. FL with DP incurred lower computational cost; however, LR was more sensitive to calibrated noise than the NN, resulting in greater performance degradation. Our findings provide practical guidance for deploying privacy-preserving FL in fragmented healthcare systems.
title Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning via Differential Privacy and Homomorphic Encryption for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Modeling
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27598