FLEM-XAI: Federated learning based real time ensemble model with explainable AI framework for an efficient diagnosis of lung diseases

The computer-aided diagnosis helps medical professionals detect and classify lung diseases from chest X-rays by leveraging medical image processing and central server-based machine learning models. These technologies provide real-time assistance to analyze the input and help efficiently detect the abnormalities at the earliest. However, traditional learning models are not suitable for live scenarios that require privacy, data diversity, and decentralized processing. The Federated learning-based model facilitates the protection of medical data privacy while processing a large volume of medical images, aiming to improve the overall efficiency of the model. This paper proposes a Federated Learning based Ensemble Model (FLEM) framework for an efficient diagnosis of lung diseases. The FLEM utilizes explainable AI techniques, including SHAP, Grad-CAM, and Differential Privacy, to provide transparency and interpretability of predictions while maintaining the privacy and security of medical data. We applied InceptionV3, Conv2D, VGG16, and ResNet-50 models on the COVID-19, TB, and pneumonia datasets and analysed the performance of the models in FLEM and Central Server-based Learning Model (CSLM). The performance analysis shows that the FLEM model outperformed the traditional CSLM model in terms of accuracy, training time, and bandwidth consumption. CSLM witnesses a quicker convergence time than FLEM. Although the CSLM model converged after a considerable number of epochs, it resulted in a 5, 8, 9, and 10% accuracy reduction compared to the FLEM-based training of InceptionV3, Conv2D, VGG16, and ResNet50 that achieved accuracies of 91.8, 88, 92.5, and 95.5%, respectively.