Towards robust neurocomputing model in efficient federated brain tumour segmentation with sparsification and weights clustering

Brain tumour segmentation is a key application of AI in neuroimaging. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a strategic and increasingly relevant paradigm in neural computing due to its ability to address key challenges in large-scale neural network training, such as data access, privacy, collaborative learning, and model robustness. However, its adoption is currently hindered by high communication costs and the heterogeneity of client data. In this study, we investigated an efficient FL framework for brain tumour segmentation based on communication-aware optimization. We evaluated FedWSOComp, which integrates sparsification, quantization, and entropy-based encoding, in combination with a 3D U-Net architecture under both homogeneous and heterogeneous data distributions. The multi-institutional FeTS 2024 dataset was employed and partitioned into independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID settings, with an independent test set of 67 patients. An overall of 18 configurations combined sparsification rates and quantization levels. Performance was measured using Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95). Experimental results demonstrated that aggressive compression caused severe degradation in segmentation quality, with HD95 exceeding 60 mm. In contrast, higher retention with finer quantization achieved the best balance between efficiency and accuracy, reaching a DSC and HD95 mm on the test set under non-IID conditions. The findings demonstrated that, when configured with moderate-to-fine quantization and high sparsification retention, FedWSOComp enabled accurate and communication-efficient federated brain tumour segmentation. This study provides quantitative evidence and practical guidance for the deployment of FL-based segmentation models in privacy-sensitive and bandwidth-constrained clinical settings. • Analyse the impact of FedWSOComp, an integrated strategy combining top-k sparsification, quantization, and entropy-based encoding. • The performance of 18 different configurations (including IID and non-IID) was evaluated systematically. • High retention (60%) with fine quantization (64 clusters) optimizes performance.