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A cautionary tale on the cost-effectiveness of collaborative AI in real-world medical applications.

Innocenti, L.; Ourselin, S.; Goh, V.; Antonelli, M.; Lorenzi, M.

2024-06-01 bioinformatics
10.1101/2024.05.27.596048 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Federated learning (FL) has gained wide popularity as a collaborative learning paradigm enabling trustworthy AI in sensitive healthcare applications. Never-theless, the practical implementation of FL presents technical and organizational challenges, as it generally requires complex communication infrastructures. In this context, consensus-based learning (CBL) may represent a promising collaborative learning alternative, thanks to the ability of combining local knowledge into a federated decision system, while potentially reducing deployment over-head. In this work we propose an extensive benchmark of the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of a panel of FL and CBL methods in a wide range of collaborative medical data analysis scenarios. Our results reveal that CBL is a cost-effective alternative to FL, providing comparable accuracy and significantly reducing training and communication costs. This study opens a novel perspective on the deployment of collaborative AI in real-world applications, whereas the adoption of cost-effective methods is instrumental to achieve sustainability and democratisation of AI by alleviating the need for extensive computational resources.

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