Federation Opacity and the Promise of Federated Learning in Healthcare.

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning (ML) approach that allows multiple devices or institutions to collaboratively train an ML model without sharing their local data with a third-party. It has recently received significant attention as a promising way to overcome longstanding ethical obstac...

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Publicado en:American Journal of Bioethics Vol. 26; no. 8; pp. 119 - 133
Autores principales: Hatherley, Joshua, Søgaard, Anders, Ballantyne, Angela, Pauwels, Ruben
Formato: glossary tables/charts Journal Article
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Aug2026
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Aug2026
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      pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd
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        10.1080/15265161.2026.2637093
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        atl: Federation Opacity and the Promise of Federated Learning in Healthcare.
      aug:
        au:
          Hatherley, Joshua
          Søgaard, Anders
          Ballantyne, Angela
          Pauwels, Ruben
        affil: University of Copenhagen
      sug:
        subj:
          Federated Learning Ethical Issues
          Health Care Delivery
          Collaboration
          Ethics, Medical
          Machine Learning Algorithms
          Accountability
          Data Security
          Privacy and Confidentiality
          Philosophy, Medical
          Information Storage
          Information Retrieval
          Decision Making
          Rare Diseases Diagnosis
          Patient Safety
      ab: Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning (ML) approach that allows multiple devices or institutions to collaboratively train an ML model without sharing their local data with a third-party. It has recently received significant attention as a promising way to overcome longstanding ethical obstacles to training medical ML models with patient health data. This paper examines the promise of FL in healthcare from an ethical perspective. It argues that medical FL generates a new variety of opacity – federation opacity, wherein stakeholders cannot access, analyze, or curate the data on which a model has been trained – which (a) presents distinctive ethical challenges concerning institutional fairness and accountability in medical ML; and (b) makes FL models especially vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. It then identifies several key claims about the expected benefits of FL in healthcare and argues that they may be either exaggerated, misleading, or incomplete – often due to the problem of federation opacity.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        glossary
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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