FedGAN: Federated diabetic retinopathy image generation

Abstract

Deep learning models for diagnostic applications require large amounts of sensitive patient data, raising privacy concerns under centralized training paradigms. We propose FedGAN, a federated learning framework for synthetic medical image generation that combines Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with cross-silo federated learning. Our approach pretrains a DCGAN on abdominal CT scans and fine-tunes it collaboratively across clinical silos using diabetic retinopathy datasets. By federating the GAN’s discriminator and generator via the Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm, FedGAN generates high-quality synthetic retinal images while complying with HIPAA and GDPR. Experiments demonstrate that FedGAN achieves a realism score of 0.43 (measured by a centralized discriminator). This work bridges data scarcity and privacy challenges in medical AI, enabling secure collaboration across institutions.