FedDermaSeg: Federated Learning for Dermatological Image Segmentation

Abstract

Skin cancer is a major global health concern, and early detection and accurate lesion delineation are important for effective diagnosis and treatment planning. Automated skin lesion analysis can assist dermatologists, with lesion segmentation serving as a fundamental step in computer-aided diagnostic systems. Conventional deep learning-based segmentation models typically rely on centralized training, where images and their corresponding segmentation masks are collected on a central server. Such data aggregation raises privacy concerns in medical applications and requires substantial centralized computational resources. To address these limitations, we investigate the feasibility of federated learning for privacy-preserving skin lesion segmentation. The training and validation sets of the ISIC 2018 Skin Lesion Segmentation Challenge dataset are used to simulate a distributed learning environment and develop a federated segmentation model. The resulting model is evaluated on the ISIC 2018 test set and the PH2 dataset to assess its performance and generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate that the federated model achieves performance comparable to centralized training while consistently improving upon the locally trained models. These findings demonstrate the potential of federated learning for collaborative skin lesion segmentation without requiring centralized aggregation of medical images.