A Constructive Algorithm for Feedforward Neural Networks for Medical Diagnostic Reasoning

Abstract

This research is to search for alternatives to the resolution of complex medical diagnosis where human knowledge should be apprehended in a general fashion. Successful application examples show that human diagnostic capabilities are significantly worse than the neural diagnostic system. Our research describes a constructive neural network algorithm with backpropagation; offer an approach for the incremental construction of nearminimal neural network architectures for pattern classification. The algorithm starts with minimal number of hidden units in the single hidden layer; additional units are added to the hidden layer one at a time to improve the accuracy of the network and to get an optimal size of a neural network. Our algorithm was tested on several benchmarking classification problems including Cancer1, Heart, and Diabetes with good generalization ability.