FedGAN: Federated diabetic retinopathy image generation
Deep learning models for diagnostic applications require large amounts of sensitive patient data, raising privacy concerns under centralized training paradigms. We propose FedGAN, a federated learning framework for synthetic medical image generation that combines Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with cross-silo federated learning. Our approach pretrains a DCGAN on abdominal CT scans and fine-tunes it collaboratively across clinical silos using diabetic retinopathy datasets. By federating the GAN's discriminator and generator via the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm, FedGAN generates high-quality synthetic retinal images while complying with HIPAA and GDPR. Experiments demonstrate that FedGAN achieves a realism score of 0.43 (measured by a centralized discriminator). This work bridges data scarcity and privacy challenges in medical AI, enabling secure collaboration across institutions.
Authors
- H Kamran (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-1845-211X)
- Nouf Nawar Alotaibi
- Mrim M. Alnfiai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3837-6313)
- Sohaib Latif (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0690-2326)
- Syed Jawad Hussain (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5795-8522)
- Imtiaz Ali Soomro (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7260-6488)
Institutions
- Taif University (SA)
- University College of Islamabad (PK)
- Najran University (SA)
Publication Details
- Journal
- PLoS ONE
- Published
- 2025-07-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326579
- Citations
- 5
- Primary Topic
- Retinal Imaging and Analysis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 6.80
Funders
- Taif University