title: Potential of the back propagation neural network in the discrimination of benign from malignant gastric cells.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To investigate the potential value of morphometry and the back propagation neural network for the discrimination of benign and malignant gastric lesions.
  
  
  METHODS
  The study group consisted of 23 cases of cancer, 19 of gastritis and 58 of ulcer. Images of routinely processed gastric smears stained by the Papanicolaou technique were processed by a custom image analysis system. Analysis of the images gave a data set of 11,024 cells. Two different neural net architectures were used to classify benign from malignant cells based on the extracted morphometric and textural features. The data from 2,500 randomly selected cells were used as a training set, and the data from the remaining 8,524 cells were applied as a test set.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Application of the back propagation neural network permitted the correct classification of 97.6% of benign cells and 95% of malignant cells with overall accuracy 97.3%.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results indicate that neural networks and image morphometry may offer useful information about the potential for malignancy in gastric cells.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Cytology and Cytogenetics, Laiko Hospital, Athens, Greece.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Karakitsos
authors.forename: E B
authors.initials: EB
authors.lastname: Stergiou
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pouliakis
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tzivras
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Archimandritis
authors.forename: A I
authors.initials: AI
authors.lastname: Liossi
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kyrkou
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002452:Cell Count; D048429:Cell Size; D005260:Female; D005756:Gastritis / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D013274:Stomach Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology; D013276:Stomach Ulcer / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology