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Med."],"abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract<\/jats:title>\n                  <jats:p>This systematic review evaluates how decentralized learning (DL) approaches\u2014e.g., federated learning, swarm learning, ensemble\u2013compare with traditional models in healthcare applications. We searched eight databases (01\/2012 to 03\/2024), screening 165,010 studies with two independent reviewers. Analysis included 160 articles comprising 710 DL models and 8149 performance comparisons across clinical domains, predominantly in oncology, COVID-19, and neurological diagnostics. In paired comparisons, centralized learning (CL) demonstrated advantages in threshold-dependent metrics (78% favourability for accuracy and Dice score with large effect sizes), while DL achieved comparable performance in ranking metrics (51% centralized favourability for AUROC with small effect size). DL consistently outperformed local learning (LL) across all metrics, particularly precision (86% favourability) and accuracy (83% favourability). Clinical threshold analysis (\u22650.80 performance) revealed that CL rescued DL viability in up to 18% of comparisons, though when both achieved clinical viability, improvements typically represented \u201cexcellent versus acceptable\u201d performance (median difference of 0.7\u20131.5pp) rather than \u201cacceptable versus inadequate.\u201d DL rescued LL viability with substantial improvements (median difference of 7.6\u201327pp). These findings demonstrate DL offers clinically acceptable alternatives for privacy-constrained contexts, with implementation decisions balancing marginal performance trade-offs against regulation (e.g., GDPR, AI Act) and application. 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