Real World Federated Learning with a Knowledge Distilled Transformer for Cardiac CT Imaging
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Abstract (arXiv)
Federated learning is a renowned technique for utilizing decentralized data while preserving privacy. However, real-world applications often face challenges like partially labeled datasets, where only a few locations have certain expert annotations, leaving large portions of unlabeled data unused. Leveraging these could enhance transformer architectures ability in regimes with small and diversely annotated sets. We conduct the largest federated cardiac CT analysis to date (n=8,104) in a real-world setting across eight hospitals. Our two-step semi-supervised strategy distills knowledge from task-specific CNNs into a transformer. First, CNNs predict on unlabeled data per label type and then the transformer learns from these predictions with label-specific heads. This improves predictive accuracy and enables simultaneous learning of all partial labels across the federation, and outperforms UNet-based models in generalizability on downstream tasks. Code and model weights are made openly available for leveraging future cardiac CT analysis.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 89 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2024.
Builds on
44 of 89 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 4; 2026: 3.
8 papers.
- 2025Federated EndoViT: Pretraining Vision Transformers via Federated Learning on Endoscopic Image Collectionscited by 3
- 2025Federated Learning for Large Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 2
- 2025Cardiac-CLIP: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for 3D Cardiac CT Imagescited by 1
- 2024Multi-Modal Dataset Creation for Federated Learning with DICOM Structured Reportscited by 0
- 2025FRIEREN: Federated Learning with Vision-Language Regularization for Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026Overcoming data scarcity through multi-center federated learning for organs-at-risk segmentation in pediatric upper abdominal radiotherapycited by 0
- 2026FedMust: Semi-supervised Multi-task Student-Teacher Federated Learning for Multi-organ CT Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026A Statistical Perspective on Knowledge Distillation: Foundations, Classical Methods, and Large Language Model Extensionscited by 0
- 2026A Statistical Perspective on Knowledge Distillation: Foundations, Classical Methods, and Large Language Model Extensions27 Sep 2026
- 2026FedMust: Semi-supervised Multi-task Student-Teacher Federated Learning for Multi-organ CT Segmentation21 Sep 2026
- 2026Overcoming data scarcity through multi-center federated learning for organs-at-risk segmentation in pediatric upper abdominal radiotherapy7 May 2026
- 2025FRIEREN: Federated Learning with Vision-Language Regularization for Segmentation2 Oct 2025
- 2025Federated Learning for Large Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Review28 Aug 2025
- 2025Cardiac-CLIP: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for 3D Cardiac CT Images29 Jul 2025
- 2025Federated EndoViT: Pretraining Vision Transformers via Federated Learning on Endoscopic Image Collections23 Apr 2025
- 2024Multi-Modal Dataset Creation for Federated Learning with DICOM Structured Reports12 Jul 2024