Artificial Neural Networks in Medicine and Biology

Book excerpt: This book contains the proceedings of the conference ANNIMAB-l, held 13-16 May 2000 in Goteborg, Sweden. The conference was organized by the Society for Artificial Neural Networks in Medicine and Biology (ANNIMAB-S), which was established to promote research within a new and genuinely cross-disciplinary field. Forty-two contributions were accepted for presentation; in addition to these, S invited papers are also included. Research within medicine and biology has often been characterised by application of statistical methods for evaluating domain specific data. The growing interest in Artificial Neural Networks has not only introduced new methods for data analysis, but also opened up for development of new models of biological and ecological systems. The ANNIMAB-l conference is focusing on some of the many uses of artificial neural networks with relevance for medicine and biology, specifically: • Medical applications of artificial neural networks: for better diagnoses and outcome predictions from clinical and laboratory data, in the processing of ECG and EEG signals, in medical image analysis, etc. More than half of the contributions address such clinically oriented issues. • Uses of ANNs in biology outside clinical medicine: for example, in models of ecology and evolution, for data analysis in molecular biology, and (of course) in models of animal and human nervous systems and their capabilities. • Theoretical aspects: recent developments in learning algorithms, ANNs in relation to expert systems and to traditional statistical procedures, hybrid systems and integrative approaches.