Federated learning for multi-institutional AI in healthcare via digital pathology

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital pathology has shown significant promise in advancing cancer diagnostics, grading, and treatment response prediction. However, widespread development and deployment of robust AI models face critical challenges due to data silos, privacy concerns, and the need for large-scale multi-institutional datasets. Federated Learning (FL) presents a transformative approach by enabling collaborative model training across hospitals without direct data sharing. In this review, we summarize recent developments in FL as applied to digital pathology, highlight pioneering use cases, and explore the technical, regulatory, and ethical hurdles. We discuss how FL can enable scalable, privacy-preserving AI models, and outline future directions for standardizing and validating FL-based approaches in clinical workflows.