title: Application of the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network model to medical pattern classification tasks.
abstract: This paper presents research into the application of the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network model to medical pattern classification tasks. A number of domains, both diagnostic and prognostic, are considered. Each such domain highlights a particularly useful aspect of the model. The first coronary care patient prognosis, demonstrates the ARTMAP voting strategy involving 'pooled' decision-making using a number of networks, each of which has learned a slightly different mapping of input features to pattern classes. The second domain, breast cancer diagnosis, demonstrates the model's symbolic rule extraction capabilities which support the validation and explanation of a network's predictions. The final domain, diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction, demonstrates a novel category pruning technique allowing the performance of a trained network to be altered so as to favour predictions of one class over another (e.g. trading sensitivity for specificity or vice versa). It also introduces a 'cascaded' variant of the voting strategy intended to allow identification of a subset of cases which the network has a very high certainty of classifying correctly.
authors.affiliation: Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Downs
authors.forename: R F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Harrison
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Kennedy
authors.forename: S S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Cross
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003327:Coronary Disease / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000401:mortality / Q000473:pathology; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D006801:Humans; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000473:pathology; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D011379:Prognosis; D016019:Survival Analysis