Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks

Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging

Adaptive Double Self-Organizing Map for Clustering Gene Expression Data

This thesis presents a novel clustering technique known as adaptive double self- organizing map (ADSOM) that addresses the issue of identifying the correct number of clusters. ADSOM has a flexible topology and performs clustering and cluster visualization simultaneously, thereby requiring no a priori knowledge about the number of clusters. ADSOM combines features of the popular self-organizing map with two- dimensional position vectors, which serve as a visualization tool to decide the number of clusters. It updates its free parameters during training and it allows convergence of its position vectors to a fairly consistent number of clusters provided that its initial number of nodes is greater than the expected number of clusters. A novel index is introduced based on hierarchical clustering of the final locations of position vectors. The index allows automated detection of the number of clusters, thereby reducing human error that could be incurred from counting clusters visually. The reliance of ADSOM in identifying the number of clusters is proven by applying it to publicly available gene expression data from multiple biological systems such as yeast, human, mouse, and bacteria

Data mining using intelligent systems : an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree approach

Data mining can be said to have the aim to analyze the observational datasets to find relationships and to present the data in ways that are both understandable and useful. In this thesis, some existing intelligent systems techniques such as Self-Organizing Map, Fuzzy C-means and decision tree are used to analyze several datasets. The techniques are used to provide flexible information processing capability for handling real-life situations. This thesis is concerned with the design, implementation, testing and application of these techniques to those datasets. The thesis also introduces a hybrid intelligent systems technique: Optimized Weighted Fuzzy Decision Tree (OWFDT) with the aim of improving Fuzzy Decision Trees (FDT) and solving practical problems. This thesis first proposes an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree, incorporating the introduction of Fuzzy C-Means to fuzzify the input instances but keeping the expected labels crisp. This leads to a different output layer activation function and weight connection in the neural network (NN) structure obtained by mapping the FDT to the NN. A momentum term was also introduced into the learning process to train the weight connections to avoid oscillation or divergence. A new reasoning mechanism has been also proposed to combine the constructed tree with those weights which had been optimized in the learning process. This thesis also makes a comparison between the OWFDT and two benchmark algorithms, Fuzzy ID3 and weighted FDT. SIx datasets ranging from material science to medical and civil engineering were introduced as case study applications. These datasets involve classification of composite material failure mechanism, classification of electrocorticography (ECoG)/Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, eye bacteria prediction and wave overtopping prediction. Different intelligent systems techniques were used to cluster the patterns and predict the classes although OWFDT was used to design classifiers for all the datasets. In the material dataset, Self-Organizing Map and Fuzzy C-Means were used to cluster the acoustic event signals and classify those events to different failure mechanism, after the classification, OWFDT was introduced to design a classifier in an attempt to classify acoustic event signals. For the eye bacteria dataset, we use the bagging technique to improve the classification accuracy of Multilayer Perceptrons and Decision Trees. Bootstrap aggregating (bagging) to Decision Tree also helped to select those most important sensors (features) so that the dimension of the data could be reduced. Those features which were most important were used to grow the OWFDT and the curse of dimensionality problem could be solved using this approach. The last dataset, which is concerned with wave overtopping, was used to benchmark OWFDT with some other Intelligent Systems techniques, such as Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), Genetic Neural Mathematical Method (GNMM) and Fuzzy ARTMAP. Through analyzing these datasets using these Intelligent Systems Techniques, it has been shown that patterns and classes can be found or can be classified through combining those techniques together. OWFDT has also demonstrated its efficiency and effectiveness as compared with a conventional fuzzy Decision Tree and weighted fuzzy Decision Tree