Akis Linardos, Sarthak Pati, Ujjwal Baid, Brandon Edwards, Patrick Foley, Kevin Ta, Verena Chung, Micah Sheller, Muhammad Irfan Khan, Mojtaba Jafaritadi, Elina Kontio, Suleiman A. Khan, Leon Mächler, Ivan Ezhov, Suprosanna Shit, Johannes C. Paetzold, Gustav Grimberg, Manuel Nickel, David Naccache, Vasilis Siomos, Jonathan Passerat‐Palmbach, Giacomo Tarroni, Daewoon Kim, Leonard L. Klausmann, Prashant Shah, Bjoern Menze, Dimitris P. Makris, Spyridon Bakas
We present the design and results of the MICCAI Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) Challenge 2024, which focuses on federated learning (FL) for glioma sub-region segmentation in multi-parametric MRI scans. Unlike previous FeTS challenges, this iteration exclusively evaluates novel weight aggregation methods for increased robustness and efficiency. Participating methods from six teams are evaluated using a standardized FL setup and a multi-institutional dataset derived from the BraTS glioma benchmark—a dataset consisting of 1,251 training cases, 219 validation cases, and 570 hidden test cases, with segmentations of enhancing tumor (ET), tumor core (TC), and whole tumor (WT). Teams are ranked by a cumulative scoring system that accounts for segmentation performance—measured by Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95)—and communication efficiency assessed through the convergence score. A PID-controller-based approach emerges as the top-performing method, achieving a mean DSC of 0.733, 0.761, and 0.751 for ET, TC, and WT, respectively, with corresponding HD95 values of 33.922mm, 33.623mm, and 32.309mm, while also being the most efficient with a convergence score of 0.764. These results contribute to ongoing advances in FL, building on top-performers from previous iterations of the challenge and surpassing them, highlighting the potential of PID controllers as a powerful mechanism for stabilizing and optimizing weight aggregation in FL. The challenge code is available at https://github.com/FeTS-AI/Challenge