Neural Networks In Medical And Healthcare

Abstract

Neural networks provide significant benefits in medical research. They are actively being used for such applications as locating previously undetected patterns in mountains of research data, controlling medical devices based on biofeedback, and detecting characteristics in medical imagery. In  its  first  part,  this  contribution  reviews  shortly  the  application  of  neural network methods to medical problems and characterizes its advantages and problems in the context of  the medical background. Artificial neural networks are computational paradigms based on mathematical models that unlike traditional computing have a structure and operation that resembles that of the mammal brain. Neural networks lack centralized control in the classical sense, since all the interconnected processing elements change or "adapt” simultaneously with the flow of information and adaptive rules.

 One of the original aims of artificial neural networks (ANN) was to understand and shape the functional characteristics and computational properties of the brain when it performs cognitive processes such as sensorial perception, concept categorization, concept association and learning. However, today a great deal of effort is focused on the development of neural networks for applications such as pattern recognition and classification, data compression and optimization.