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

Context-aware visual exploration of molecular databases

Facilitating the visual exploration of scientific data has received increasing attention in the past decade or so. Especially in life science related application areas the amount of available data has grown at a breath taking pace. In this paper we describe an approach that allows for visual inspection of large collections of molecular compounds. In contrast to classical visualizations of such spaces we incorporate a specific focus of analysis, for example the outcome of a biological experiment such as high throughout screening results. The presented method uses this experimental data to select molecular fragments of the underlying molecules that have interesting properties and uses the resulting space to generate a two dimensional map based on a singular value decomposition algorithm and a self organizing map. Experiments on real datasets show that the resulting visual landscape groups molecules of similar chemical properties in densely connected regions

ANTIDS: Self-Organized Ant-based Clustering Model for Intrusion Detection System

Security of computers and the networks that connect them is increasingly becoming of great significance. Computer security is defined as the protection of computing systems against threats to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. There are two types of intruders: the external intruders who are unauthorized users of the machines they attack, and internal intruders, who have permission to access the system with some restrictions. Due to the fact that it is more and more improbable to a system administrator to recognize and manually intervene to stop an attack, there is an increasing recognition that ID systems should have a lot to earn on following its basic principles on the behavior of complex natural systems, namely in what refers to self-organization, allowing for a real distributed and collective perception of this phenomena. With that aim in mind, the present work presents a self-organized ant colony based intrusion detection system (ANTIDS) to detect intrusions in a network infrastructure. The performance is compared among conventional soft computing paradigms like Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines and Linear Genetic Programming to model fast, online and efficient intrusion detection systems.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Swarm Intelligence and Patterns (SIP)- special track at WSTST 2005, Muroran, JAPA

Integrating Symbolic and Neural Processing in a Self-Organizing Architechture for Pattern Recognition and Prediction

British Petroleum (89A-1204); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N00014-92-J-4015); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100); Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0225

Tongue Image Analysis for Diabetes Mellitus Diagnosis Based on SOM Kohonen

Tongue diagnosis is an important diagnostic method for evaluating the condition of internal organ by looking at the image of tongue . However, due to its qualitative, subjective and experience-based nature, traditional tongue diagnosis has a very limited application in clinical medicine. Moreover, traditional tongue diagnosis is always concerned with the identification of syndromes rather than with the connection between tongue abnormal appearances and diseases. This is not well understood in Western medicine, thus greatly obstruct its wider use in the world. In this paper, we present a novel computerized tongue inspection method aiming to address these problems. First, two kinds of quantitative features, chromatic and textural measures, are extracted from tongue images by using popular digital image processing techniques. Then, SOM Kohonen are employed to model the relationship between these quantitative features and diseases. The effectiveness of the method is tested on 35 patients affected by Diabetes Mellitus as well as other 30 healthy volunteers, and the diagnostic results predicted by the previously trained SOM Kohonen classifiers are compared with the HOMA-B

ART and ARTMAP Neural Networks for Applications: Self-Organizing Learning, Recognition, and Prediction

ART and ARTMAP neural networks for adaptive recognition and prediction have been applied to a variety of problems. Applications include parts design retrieval at the Boeing Company, automatic mapping from remote sensing satellite measurements, medical database prediction, and robot vision. This chapter features a self-contained introduction to ART and ARTMAP dynamics and a complete algorithm for applications. Computational properties of these networks are illustrated by means of remote sensing and medical database examples. The basic ART and ARTMAP networks feature winner-take-all (WTA) competitive coding, which groups inputs into discrete recognition categories. WTA coding in these networks enables fast learning, that allows the network to encode important rare cases but that may lead to inefficient category proliferation with noisy training inputs. This problem is partially solved by ART-EMAP, which use WTA coding for learning but distributed category representations for test-set prediction. In medical database prediction problems, which often feature inconsistent training input predictions, the ARTMAP-IC network further improves ARTMAP performance with distributed prediction, category instance counting, and a new search algorithm. A recently developed family of ART models (dART and dARTMAP) retains stable coding, recognition, and prediction, but allows arbitrarily distributed category representation during learning as well as performance.National Science Foundation (IRI 94-01659, SBR 93-00633); Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-0657

Satellite-based precipitation estimation using watershed segmentation and growing hierarchical self-organizing map

This paper outlines the development of a multi-satellite precipitation estimation methodology that draws on techniques from machine learning and morphology to produce high-resolution, short-duration rainfall estimates in an automated fashion. First, cloud systems are identified from geostationary infrared imagery using morphology based watershed segmentation algorithm. Second, a novel pattern recognition technique, growing hierarchical self-organizing map (GHSOM), is used to classify clouds into a number of clusters with hierarchical architecture. Finally, each cloud cluster is associated with co-registered passive microwave rainfall observations through a cumulative histogram matching approach. The network was initially trained using remotely sensed geostationary infrared satellite imagery and hourly ground-radar data in lieu of a dense constellation of polar-orbiting spacecraft such as the proposed global precipitation measurement (GPM) mission. Ground-radar and gauge rainfall measurements were used to evaluate this technique for both warm (June 2004) and cold seasons (December 2004-February 2005) at various temporal (daily and monthly) and spatial (0.04 and 0.25) scales. Significant improvements of estimation accuracy are found classifying the clouds into hierarchical sub-layers rather than a single layer. Furthermore, 2-year (2003-2004) satellite rainfall estimates generated by the current algorithm were compared with gauge-corrected Stage IV radar rainfall at various time scales over continental United States. This study demonstrates the usefulness of the watershed segmentation and the GHSOM in satellite-based rainfall estimations