Privacy-Preserving Detection of Rare Disease-Associated Cell Subsets via Secure Multi-Party Computation

Abstract

The detection of rare disease-associated cell subsets from high-dimensional single-cell measurements is critical for understanding diseases such as leukaemia and viral infections. CellCnn, a convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for this task, has demonstrated the ability to identify phenotype-associated cell populations at frequencies as low as 0.01\%. Training such models reliably requires patient cohorts that are larger and more diverse than any single institution can typically assemble, and the underlying single-cell data is too sensitive to share across institutional boundaries under existing privacy regulations. We propose a secure multi-party computation (MPC) framework that enables the training and inference of CellCnn entirely on secret-shared data. This ensures that neither the participants nor the computing servers ever observe raw patient data or intermediate values. Evaluated on benchmark single-cell datasets for cytomegalovirus infection (CMV) and acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), our implementation preserves accuracy close to its plaintext counterpart while outperforming the prior privacy-preserving baseline. In contrast to earlier privacy-preserving approaches that removed components such as ReLU activations and bias terms, our method retains these key parts of the CellCnn architecture and supports accurate analysis without exposing raw patient data.