Segmentation is one of the most primary tasks in deep learning for medical
imaging, owing to its multiple downstream clinical applications. However,
generating manual annotations for medical images is time-consuming, requires
high skill, and is an expensive effort, especially for 3D images. One potential
solution is to aggregate knowledge from partially annotated datasets from
multiple groups to collaboratively train global models using Federated
Learning. To this end, we propose SegViz, a federated learning-based framework
to train a segmentation model from distributed non-i.i.d datasets with partial
annotations. The performance of SegViz was compared against training individual
models separately on each dataset as well as centrally aggregating all the
datasets in one place and training a single model. The SegViz framework using
FedBN as the aggregation strategy demonstrated excellent performance on the
external BTCV set with dice scores of 0.93, 0.83, 0.55, and 0.75 for
segmentation of liver, spleen, pancreas, and kidneys, respectively,
significantly (p<0.05) better (except spleen) than the dice scores of 0.87,
0.83, 0.42, and 0.48 for the baseline models. In contrast, the central
aggregation model significantly (p<0.05) performed poorly on the test dataset
with dice scores of 0.65, 0, 0.55, and 0.68. Our results demonstrate the
potential of the SegViz framework to train multi-task models from distributed
datasets with partial labels. All our implementations are open-source and
available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SegViz-B74