healthcare it teams

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems, jointly interpreting images and natural language queries, hold significant promise across many domains, yet the privacy-sensitive nature of user data creates a fundamental barrier. Centralized training requires access to all data, while federated learning requires each client to host the full model. We propose USPLIT-VQA, a U-shaped split learning framework for privacy-preserving VQA in which each client retains the initial layers and the classification head while the server hosts the computationally heavy intermediate layers, keeping raw inputs and labels on the client device. We further introduce Contribution-Aware Weighted Aggregation (CAWA), a gradientsimilarity-based client scoring mechanism designed to reduce the influence of malicious updates. Experiments on four VQA datasets (VQA-RAD, SLAKE, PathVQA, and VizWiz) with two backbones show accuracy gains over Federated Learning for the Custom model and reduced accuracy for BiomedCLIP under the evaluated fixed split, alongside client memory reductions of up to 5.8X and communication reductions of up to 10.8X. With one malicious client, CAWA reduces the attacker's influence by over 98%, while experiments at higher corruption levels identify its limitations. Reconstruction experiments further show lower inversion quality under the evaluated attacks.

Abstract: Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) technology is revolutionising the healthcare industry by enabling real-time data collection and analysis for personalised patient care. However, the rapid expansion of HIoT technology introduces challenges such as increased latency and higher energy consumption in fog computing environments, particularly when managing battery-operated devices. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel scheduling strategy that optimises both power consumption and latency through task-oriented scheduling for HIoT tasks. The proposed strategy, named PLATOS (Power and Latency Aware Task Oriented Scheduling), is implemented in four sequential phases. In the first phase, HIoT tasks are categorised into three groups: priority-oriented, storage-oriented, and computational-oriented. The second phase focuses on latency optimisation by identifying the fog computing resources that yield the lowest execution delay for each task category. In the third phase, power optimisation is achieved by selecting the resources that minimise energy consumption. Finally, in the decision-making phase, high-performance fog resources are allocated to high-priority tasks while the remaining tasks are scheduled based on a mapped list derived from the latency and power optimisation phases. Simulation experiments conducted in iFogSim2 demonstrate that PLATOS reduces energy consumption by 18.72% and latency by 8.65% when compared to the state-of-the-art. These improvements enhance the efficiency and responsiveness of HIoT systems and contribute to more effective patient care and proactive healthcare service delivery.