  Federated learning (FL) can collaboratively train deep learning models using
isolated patient data owned by different hospitals for various clinical
applications, including medical image segmentation. However, a major problem of
FL is its performance degradation when dealing with data that are not
independently and identically distributed (non-iid), which is often the case in
medical images. In this paper, we first conduct a theoretical analysis on the
FL algorithm to reveal the problem of model aggregation during training on
non-iid data. With the insights gained through the analysis, we propose a
simple yet effective method, federated cross learning (FedCross), to tackle
this challenging problem. Unlike the conventional FL methods that combine
multiple individually trained local models on a server node, our FedCross
sequentially trains the global model across different clients in a round-robin
manner, and thus the entire training procedure does not involve any model
aggregation steps. To further improve its performance to be comparable with the
centralized learning method, we combine the FedCross with an ensemble learning
mechanism to compose a federated cross ensemble learning (FedCrossEns) method.
Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using a set of public datasets. The
experimental results show that the proposed FedCross training strategy
outperforms the mainstream FL methods on non-iid data. In addition to improving
the segmentation performance, our FedCrossEns can further provide a
quantitative estimation of the model uncertainty, demonstrating the
effectiveness and clinical significance of our designs. Source code is publicly
available at https://github.com/DIAL-RPI/FedCross.
