Privacy-Aware Hierarchical Federated Learning in Healthcare: Integrating Differential Privacy and Secure Multi-Party Computation

Jatinder Pal Singh (), Aqsa Aqsa, Imran Ghani (), Raj Sonani and Vijay Govindarajan
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Jatinder Pal Singh: Apple Inc., 34403 Locke Ave, Fremont, CA 94555, USA
Aqsa Aqsa: Department of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Imran Ghani: Computer and Information Sciences, Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Lexington, VA 24450, USA
Raj Sonani: Independent Researcher, Syracuse, NY 13202, USA
Vijay Govindarajan: Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA

Future Internet, 2025, vol. 17, issue 8, 1-24

Abstract: The development of big data analytics in healthcare has created a demand for privacy-conscious and scalable machine learning algorithms that can allow the use of patient information across different healthcare organizations. In this study, the difficulties that come with traditional federated learning frameworks in healthcare sectors, such as scalability, computational effectiveness, and preserving patient privacy for numerous healthcare systems, are discussed. In this work, a new conceptual model known as Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) for large, integrated healthcare organizations that include several institutions is proposed. The first level of aggregation forms regional centers where local updates are first collected and then sent to the second level of aggregation to form the global update, thus reducing the message-passing traffic and improving the scalability of the HFL architecture. Furthermore, the HFL framework leveraged more robust privacy characteristics such as Local Differential Privacy (LDP), Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP), Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE). In addition, a Novel Aggregated Gradient Perturbation Mechanism is presented to alleviate noise in model updates and maintain privacy and utility. The performance of the proposed HFL framework is evaluated on real-life healthcare datasets and an artificial dataset created using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), showing that the proposed HFL framework is better than other methods. Our approach provided an accuracy of around 97% and 30% less privacy leakage compared to the existing models of FLBM-IoT and PPFLB. The proposed HFL approach can help to find the optimal balance between privacy and model performance, which is crucial for healthcare applications and scalable and secure solutions.

Keywords: differential privacy; healthcare applications; hierarchical federated learning; privacy-preserving machine learning; secure multi-party computation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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