The emerging methodology of federated learning can overcome many of the ethical and privacy obstacles preventing patient data from being pooled for analysis, according to research published this week. French-American artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Owkin Inc. has demonstrated the technique can be used to apply machine learning to datasets held at different clinical centers. In a paper published in the Oct. 7 online edition of Nature Medicine, they describe how that generated new insights into the histopathology of malignant mesothelioma.