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FedMal-XAI

An explainable federated vision transformer leveraging knowledge distillation for privacy-preserving malaria detection

Bibliographic Data

ID22077232
AuthorsTofael Ahmed Bhuiyan (Computational Intelligence Lab, Southeast University), Md Tofael Ahmed Bhuiyan (Southeast University), Abdur Rahman (0000-0002-2688-927X, Computational Intelligence Lab, Southeast University), Md Abdur Rahman (0000-0002-8684-8154, Southeast University), Fokrul Islam Khan (Wycliffe College), Farzan Majeed Noori (0000-0003-2256-3835, University of Oslo), Abdul Kadar Muhammad Masum (Southeast University)
Year2026
Volume14
Pages1769078-1769078
Publication date2026-03-26
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrontiers in Public Health (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2296-2565 • E-ISSN: 2296-2565
PublisherFrontiers Media SA (PUBLISHER • CH)
DOI10.3389/fpubh.2026.1769078
PMID41971272
OpenAlexW7140933153
LanguageEN
References cited36

Plasmodium parasites are the cause of malaria, a deadly illness that continues to pose a serious danger to world health, especially in areas with low resources where subjectivity, complexity, along with privacy issues make it difficult to employ traditional diagnostic techniques like microscopy and quick diagnostic testing. To overcome these specific challenges of diagnostic subjectivity, logistical complexity, and data privacy, this paper suggests a privacy-preserving federated learning system that uses sophisticated Vision Transformers (ViTs) for automated malaria identification from blood smear images. This paper suggests a privacy-preserving federated learning system that uses sophisticated Vision Transformers (ViTs) for automated malaria identification from segmented red blood cell (RBC) images in order to get around these issues. This architecture successfully addresses important privacy and logistical restrictions by enabling cooperative training among decentralized institutions without exchanging sensitive data. Prominent centralized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are matched in diagnostic accuracy by the federated ViT models, which include ViT-B/16, DeiT-Tiny, Swin-T, and DINOv2. Interestingly, the federated transformer variations outperform the CNN ensemble (ResNet50 + VGG16) with an accuracy of 98.15%, FedDistill-DeiT achieving 97.79%, FedAvg-Swin-T reaching 97.75%, and FedDistill-Swin-T achieving a high ROC-AUC of 0.9977. These findings show that, even in the presence of diverse data distributions, federated Vision Transformers provide a reliable, scalable, and interpretable malaria screening solution that combines high accuracy with solid privacy guarantees

Blood smear · Convolutional neural network · Deep learning · Federated learning · Malaria · Transformer · AI in cancer detection · COVID-19 diagnosis using AI · Digital Imaging for Blood Diseases · Architecture

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