Following the intense research activIties of the last decade, artificial neural networks have emerged as one of the most promising new technologies for improving the quality of healthcare. Many successful applications of neural networks to biomedical problems have been reported which demonstrate, convincingly, the distinct benefits of neural networks, although many ofthese have only undergone a limited clinical evaluation. Healthcare providers and developers alike have discovered that medicine and healthcare are fertile areas for neural networks: the problems here require expertise and often involve non-trivial pattern recognition tasks - there are genuine difficulties with conventional methods, and data can be plentiful. The intense research activities in medical neural networks, and allied areas of artificial intelligence, have led to a substantial body of knowledge and the introduction of some neural systems into clinical practice. An aim of this book is to provide a coherent framework for some of the most experienced users and developers of medical neural networks in the world to share their knowledge and expertise with readers.
