T he scientific, academic, medical and data science communities have come together in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to rapidly assess novel paradigms in artificial intelligence (AI) that are rapid and secure, and potentially incentivize data sharing and model training and testing without the usual privacy and data ownership hurdles of conventional collaborations 1,2 . Healthcare providers, researchers and industry have pivoted their focus to address unmet and critical clinical needs created by the crisis, with remarkable results [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] . Clinical trial recruitment has been expedited and facilitated by national regulatory bodies and an international cooperative spirit 10-12 . The data analytics and AI disciplines have always fostered open

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‘Federated Learning’ (FL) is a method to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) models with data from multiple sources while maintaining anonymity of the data thus removing many barriers to data sharing. During the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, 20 institutes collaborated on a healthcare FL study to predict future oxygen requirements of infected patients using inputs of vital signs, laboratory data, and chest x-rays, constituting the “EXAM” (EMR CXR AI Model) model. EXAM achieved an average Area Under the Curve (AUC) of over 0.92, an average improvement of 16%, and a 38% increase in generalisability over local models. The FL paradigm was successfully applied to facilitate a rapid data science collaboration without data exchange, resulting in a model that generalised across heterogeneous, unharmonized datasets. This provided the broader healthcare community with a validated model to respond to COVID-19 challenges, as well as set the stage for broader use of FL in healthcare.

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