# FedFTN: Personalized Federated Learning with Deep Feature Transformation Network for Multi-institutional Low-count PET Denoising

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00570 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00570/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07873/) (2019)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08119/) (2020)
- [FedBN: Federated Learning on Non-IID Features via Local Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07623/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning with Personalization Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00818/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Shared Representations for Personalized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07078/) (2021)
- [Personalized Federated Learning: A Meta-Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07948/) (2020)
- [Personalized Federated Learning using Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04628/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Gradient Inversion Attacks and Defenses in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00059/) (2021)
- [Privacy and Robustness in Federated Learning: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06337/) (2020)
- [Multi-institutional Collaborations for Improving Deep Learning-based Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction Using Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02148/) (2021)
- [DuDoRNet: Learning a Dual-Domain Recurrent Network for Fast MRI Reconstruction with Deep T1 Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03799/) (2020)
- [Can Deep Learning Outperform Modern Commercial CT Image Reconstruction Methods?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03691/) (2018)
- [Specificity-Preserving Federated Learning for MR Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05752/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning of Generative Image Priors for MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04175/) (2022)
- [DSFormer: A Dual-domain Self-supervised Transformer for Accelerated Multi-contrast MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10776/) (2022)
- [One Model to Unite Them All: Personalized Federated Learning of Multi-Contrast MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06509/) (2022)
- [Artificial Intelligence-Based Image Enhancement in PET Imaging: Noise Reduction and Resolution Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13595/) (2021)
- [Fast-MC-PET: A Novel Deep Learning-aided Motion Correction and Reconstruction Framework for Accelerated PET](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07135/) (2023)
- [Limited View Tomographic Reconstruction Using a Deep Recurrent Framework with Residual Dense Spatial-Channel Attention Network and Sinogram Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01782/) (2020)
- [Simultaneous Denoising and Motion Estimation for Low-dose Gated PET using a Siamese Adversarial Network with Gate-to-Gate Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06757/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Dose-aware Diffusion Model for 3D PET Image Denoising: Multi-institutional Validation with Reader Study and Real Low-dose Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12996/) (2024)
- [Towards Personalized Multi-Modal MRI Synthesis across Heterogeneous Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19723/) (2026)
- [FL-MedSegBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Learning on Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11659/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-count PET is an efficient way to reduce radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the reconstructed images often suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), thus affecting diagnosis and other downstream tasks. Recent advances in deep learning have shown great potential in improving low-count PET image quality, but acquiring a large, centralized, and diverse dataset from multiple institutions for training a robust model is difficult due to privacy and security concerns of patient data. Moreover, low-count PET data at different institutions may have different data distribution, thus requiring personalized models. While previous federated learning (FL) algorithms enable multi-institution collaborative training without the need of aggregating local data, addressing the large domain shift in the application of multi-institutional low-count PET denoising remains a challenge and is still highly under-explored. In this work, we propose FedFTN, a personalized federated learning strategy that addresses these challenges. FedFTN uses a local deep feature transformation network (FTN) to modulate the feature outputs of a globally shared denoising network, enabling personalized low-count PET denoising for each institution. During the federated learning process, only the denoising network's weights are communicated and aggregated, while the FTN remains at the local institutions for feature transformation. We evaluated our method using a large-scale dataset of multi-institutional low-count PET imaging data from three medical centers located across three continents, and showed that FedFTN provides high-quality low-count PET images, outperforming previous baseline FL reconstruction methods across all low-count levels at all three institutions.