A Robust Framework for Secure Cardiovascular Risk Prediction: An Architectural Case Study of Differentially Private Federated Learning
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Accurate cardiovascular risk prediction is crucial for preventive healthcare; however, the development of robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) models is hindered by the fragmentation of clinical data across institutions due to stringent privacy regulations. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural case study validating the engineering robustness of FedCVR, a privacy-preserving Federated Learning framework applied to heterogeneous clinical networks. Rather than proposing a new theoretical optimizer, this work focuses on a systems engineering analysis to quantify the operational trade-offs of server-side adaptive optimization under utility-prioritized Differential Privacy (DP). By conducting a rigorous stress test in a high-fidelity synthetic environment that reflects the feature space and clinical context of real-world datasets (Framingham, Cleveland), we systematically evaluate the system's resilience to statistical noise. The validation results demonstrate that integrating server-side momentum as a temporal denoiser enables the architecture to achieve a stable F1 score of 0.78 and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.96 under the operational privacy budget (epsilon approximately 13.4), compared to a non-private baseline with an F1 score of 0.84. FedCVR statistically outperforms standard stateless baselines (FedAvg, FedProx) and other adaptive optimizers (FedAdagrad, FedYogi) under identical privacy constraints. Our findings confirm that server-side adaptivity is a structural prerequisite for recovering clinical utility under realistic privacy budgets, providing a validated engineering blueprint for secure multi-institutional collaboration.