Disk hernia and spondylolisthesis diagnosis using biomechanical features and neural network.

Artificial neural networks have found applications in various areas of medical diagnosis. The capability of neural networks to learn medical data, mining useful and complex relationships that exist between attributes has earned it a major domain in decision support systems. This paper proposes a fast automatic system for the diagnosis of disk hernia and spondylolisthesis using biomechanical features and neural network. Such systems as described within this work allow the diagnosis of new cases using trained neural networks; patients are classified as either having disk hernia, spondylolisthesis, or normal. Generally, both disk hernia and spondylolisthesis present similar symptoms; hence, diagnosis is prone to inter-misclassification error. This work is significant in that the proposed systems are capable of making fast decisions on such somewhat difficult diagnoses with reasonable accuracies. Feedforward neural network and radial basis function networks are trained on data obtained from a public database. The results obtained within this research are promising and show that neural networks can find applications as efficient and effective expert systems for the diagnosis of disk hernia and spondylolisthesis.