On using feedforward neural networks for clinical diagnostic tasks

In this paper we present an extensive comparison between several feedforward neural network types in the context of a clinical diagnostic task, namely the detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) using planar thallium-201 dipyridamole stress-redistribution scintigrams. We introduce results from well-known (e.g. multilayer perceptrons or MLPs, and radial basis function networks or RBFNs) as well as novel neural network techniques (e.g. conic section function networks) which demonstrate promising new routes for future applications of neural networks in medicine, and elsewhere. In particular we show that initializations of MLPs and conic section function networks--which can learn to behave more like an MLP or more like an RBFN--can lead to much improved results in rather difficult diagnostic tasks.