Privacy-preserving approaches are essential in health- care applications where sensitive data is involved. Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for collaboratively training decentralized models without sharing individual health records. However, ensuring privacy in health- care data, both during training and when clients exchange their models with a central server, remains a challenge. Bias, fairness, clients heterogeneity, and constrained computation are also challenging factors. To address this challenge, in this paper, a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving hybrid Federated learning (HFL) framework is specifically designed for mental healthcare applications. Two HFL approaches, namely Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) and Quantum Federated Learning (QFL), have been proposed. CFL focuses on leveraging the learning behaviour of clients and Conversely, QFL introduces a new phase to FL by incorporating a variational quantum classifier (VQC) for classification tasks. Angle encoding is used for a quantum state preparation to enhance data encoding and learning the quantum model. Experiments were conducted on independent and identically distributed (iid) and non-independent and identically distributed (non-iid) data to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods with state-of-the-art results available in the literature. The results demonstrate exceptional performance in the case of QFL, achieving an accuracy of 84.00%. CFL also exhibits promising results with an accuracy of 78.396%. Additionally, QFL achieves 18.75% better recall and CFL has 6.24% better precision than traditional FL. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to remember that every model has advantages and disadvantages of its own.
Privacy-preserving approaches are essential in health- care applications where sensitive data is involved. Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for collaboratively training decentralized models without sharing individual health records. However, ensuring privacy in health- care data, both during training and when clients exchange their models with a central server, remains a challenge. Bias, fairness, clients heterogeneity, and constrained computation are also challenging factors. To address this challenge, in this paper, a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving hybrid Federated learning (HFL) framework is specifically designed for mental healthcare applications. Two HFL approaches, namely Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) and Quantum Federated Learning (QFL), have been proposed. CFL focuses on leveraging the learning behaviour of clients and Conversely, QFL introduces a new phase to FL by incorporating a variational quantum classifier (VQC) for classification tasks. Angle encoding is used for a quantum state preparation to enhance data encoding and learning the quantum model. Experiments were conducted on independent and identically distributed (iid) and non-independent and identically distributed (non-iid) data to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods with state-of-the-art results available in the literature. The results demonstrate exceptional performance in the case of QFL, achieving an accuracy of 84.00%. CFL also exhibits promising results with an accuracy of 78.396%. Additionally, QFL achieves 18.75% better recall and CFL has 6.24% better precision than traditional FL. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to remember that every model has advantages and disadvantages of its own.
In the healthcare sector, the scarcity of data and privacy concerns present formidable challenges to the widespread adoption of machine learning. In the present-day scenario, Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a pivotal solution, fostering the rapid evolution of distributed machine learning paradigms while adeptly addressing the problem of data governance and privacy. It allows distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model by synchronizing their local updates without sharing private data. In recent years, federated learning and quantum computing have individually shown great promise to revolutionize various sectors, including healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, where privacy protection is paramount. In this article, we propose a communication-efficient Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) framework based on a variational circuit that enables clients to efficiently train and transmit quantum model parameters, thereby reducing communication rounds significantly and enhancing QFL performance using quantum natural gradient descent (QNGD) optimization. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a QFL framework for predicting the presence of coronary heart disease, diagnosing whether a patient is suffering from diabetes or not, and differentiating malignant and benign cancer by distributing the UCI datasets unbalanced among healthcare institutions. The proposed framework has the potential to incorporate privacy, security, and the expedited processing of distributed data. QNGD outperformed classical GD by reducing communication rounds by a range of 5% to 60%. In addition to reducing the communication rounds by optimizing the QFL training algorithm and achieving quicker convergence, it also determines the important features regardless of the data imbalance among the clients.
Abstract Healthcare organizations have a high volume of sensitive data and traditional technologies have limited storage capacity and computational resources. The prospect of sharing healthcare data for machine learning is more arduous due to firm regulations related to patient privacy. The balanced protection of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of healthcare data, has become a major concern beyond classical data security considerations. In recent years, federated learning offers a solution to accelerate distributed machine learning addressing concerns related to data privacy and governance. Currently, the blend of quantum computing and machine learning has experienced significant attention from academic institutions and research communities. Quantum computers have shown the potential to bring huge benefits to the healthcare sector through efficient distributed training across several quantum nodes. The ultimate objective of this work is to develop a quantum federated learning framework (QFL) to tackle the optimization, security, and privacy challenges in the healthcare and clinical industries for medical imaging tasks. In this work, we proposed federated quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) with distributed training across edge devices. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed QFL framework, we performed extensive experiments on medical datasets (Pneumonia MNIST, and CT-kidney disease analysis), which are non-independently and non-identically partitioned among the healthcare institutions/clients. The quantum federated global model maintained a high classification testing accuracy and generalizability and outperformed the locally train clients regardless of how unbalanced the medical data is distributed among the clients. The global model achieved the best performance as compared to local clients in terms of the area under curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCROC) (0.953) and an average of (0.98) on all classes for predicting outcomes on pneumonia and CT-kidney datasets, respectively. Moreover, the client selection mechanism is proposed to reduce the computation overhead at each communication round, which effectively improves the convergence rate. The proposed quantum federated learning framework is validated and assessed via large-scale simulations. Based on our results from numerical simulations, the deployment of distributed and secure quantum machine learning algorithms for enabling scalable and privacy-preserving intelligent healthcare applications would be extremely valuable.
In recent years, the growing demand for secure, efficient, and scalable machine learning has highlighted significant challenges in traditional Federated Learning (FL) systems. These challenges include computational inefficiencies in handling large-scale, high-dimensional data, privacy concerns, and the limitations of classical hardware in solving complex optimization problems. Additionally, the increasing complexity of data and the need for more robust privacy-preserving methods have pushed the boundaries of classical FL. To address these issues, this paper presents a detailed framework for Quantum Federated Learning (QFL), where quantum computing and FL converge to enable distributed quantum model training with enhanced privacy preservation. The system is modeled using local quantum models on clients and a global aggregation strategy at the server. We develop quantum gradient-based optimization with quantum cross-entropy loss, privacy preservation through encryption, and robustness to quantum noise. A set of theorems is provided to prove the correctness and efficiency of the model, supported by rigorous mathematical formulations. We used IBM Qiskit for the simulation and compared our proposed QFL with classical FL. The results demonstrate that our QFL outperformed classical FL in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.
AI-driven medical diagnostics increasingly requires collaborative model training across institutions, yet centralizing patient data conflicts with privacy regulations. Federated Learning enables distributed training without raw data sharing, but remains vulnerable to gradient inversion and model leakage attacks. Furthermore, harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks render computationally secure protocols insufficient for protecting long-lived medical records. Quantum communication offers information-theoretic security immune to such threats, making Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) a compelling framework for healthcare. However, practical deployment is constrained by communication overhead and quantum channel noise. We present a systematic quantitative study of communication, convergence, and noise trade-offs in QFL, introducing two complementary strategies to reduce quantum transmissions: (1) structured parameter reduction via light-cone feature selection in parameterized quantum circuits, and (2) a Hybrid QFL architecture that dynamically switches between centralized and decentralized aggregation. We show that Hybrid QFL reduces total quantum transmissions from 3TNMP, the cost of pure Centralized QFL, to {3t+2(T−t)}NMP over T rounds while preserving near-centralized convergence. We further demonstrate that decentralized aggregation is more noise-resilient under depolarizing noise, and evaluate Steane code-based quantum error correction in high-noise regimes. Our results provide an integrated design framework for communication-efficient, noise-aware QFL, clarifying practical trade-offs for scalable quantum-secure distributed learning in healthcare.
HRMARS - This paper introduces a new Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) system that combines quantum-enhanced transformers and federated learning to make it possible to perform real-time consumer sentiment analysis securely, at scale, and efficiently. The hybrid model proposed overcomes three significant issues: it can be accurate when working with non-IID data, it is communication-efficient, and it can protect data privacy with high security provided by quantum cryptographic protocols. Experimental analyses on IMDB, Sentiment140, Amazon, Yelp, and our own proprietary data showed that QFL is always better in precision, recall, F1 score, and convergence rate than traditional FL-BERT and FL-LSTM models. Further, QFL was able to demonstrate substantial cost and privacy leakage savings in communication at a low cost as well as maintain scalability to one thousand clients. The study fills the gap between concepts in quantum computing and federated learning and provides a practical route to privacy-sensitive distributed intelligence on a practical scale applied to e-commerce and social media analytics.
Federated Learning (FL) has become increasingly popular across different sectors, offering a way for clients to work together to train a global model without sharing sensitive data. It involves multiple rounds of communication between the global model and participating clients, which introduces several challenges like high communication costs, heterogeneous client data, prolonged processing times, and increased vulnerability to privacy threats. In recent years, the convergence of federated learning and parameterized quantum circuits has sparked significant research interest, with promising implications for fields such as healthcare and finance. By enabling decentralized training of quantum models, it allows clients or institutions to collaboratively enhance model performance and outcomes while preserving data privacy. Recognizing that Fisher information can quantify the amount of information that a quantum state carries under parameter changes, thereby providing insight into its geometric and statistical properties. We intend to leverage this property to address the aforementioned challenges. In this work, we propose a Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) algorithm that makes use of the Fisher information computed on local client models, with data distributed across heterogeneous partitions. This approach identifies the critical parameters that significantly influence the quantum model's performance, ensuring they are preserved during the aggregation process. Our research assessed the effectiveness and feasibility of QFL by comparing its performance against other variants, and exploring the benefits of incorporating Fisher information in QFL settings. Experimental results on ADNI and MNIST datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving better performance and robustness against the quantum federated averaging method.