CAFES: Chest X-ray Analysis using Federated Self-supervised Learning for Pediatric COVID-19 Detection

Chest X-rays (CXRs) play a pivotal role in cost-effective clinical assessment of various heart and lung related conditions. The urgency of COVID-19 diagnosis prompted their use in identifying conditions like lung opacity, pneumonia, and acute respiratory distress syndrome in pediatric patients. We propose an AI-driven solution for binary COVID-19 versus non-COVID-19 classification in pediatric CXRs. We present a Federated Self-Supervised Learning (FSSL) framework to enhance Vision Transformer (ViT) performance for COVID-19 detection in pediatric CXRs. ViT's prowess in vision-related binary classification tasks, combined with self-supervised pre-training on adult CXR data, forms the basis of the FSSL approach. We implement our strategy on the Rhino Health Federated Computing Platform (FCP), which ensures privacy and scalability for distributed data. The chest X-ray analysis using the federated SSL (CAFES) model, utilizes the FSSL-pre-trained ViT weights and demonstrated gains in accurately detecting COVID-19 when compared with a fully supervised model. Our FSSL-pre-trained ViT showed an area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR) of 0.952, which is 0.231 points higher than the fully supervised model for COVID-19 diagnosis using pediatric data. Our contributions include leveraging vision transformers for effective COVID-19 diagnosis from pediatric CXRs, employing distributed federated learning-based self-supervised pre-training on adult data, and improving pediatric COVID-19 diagnosis performance. This privacy-conscious approach aligns with HIPAA guidelines, paving the way for broader medical imaging applications.