Artificial intelligence: its use in medical diagnosis.

In nuclear medicine, analysis, interpretation and diagnosis may each be appropriate as applications for ANNs. Image processing and pattern recognition are two application areas of ANN technology that appear promising. An ANN (21) was used to classify normal and abnormal FDG-PET scans and performed better than discriminant analysis. Favorable results have been obtained from an ANN (22) in the interpretation of data recorded by experienced observers using various standard V/Q scans to determine the likelihood of pulmonary embolism. Carver Mead's book (23) on the development of hardware neural systems defines new approaches to ANN fabrication, including an electronic 100,000 transistor retina. As hardware is developed to permit the design of very large networks, we may expect many useful imaging applications to emerge for ANNs in the medical field.