Prediction of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer patients with neural networks.

Artificial neural networks are a kind of pattern classifiers, with growing acceptance in medical and biological research. We applied a single layer perceptron to data of 4302 patients from National Cancer Centre in Tokyo and compared the results to the Maruyama diagnostic system (MDS) and classic statistical analysis with logistic regression. While logistic regression reached no sensitivity and a specificity of 1.00 in median, MDS had a sensitivity of 0.74 and a specificity of 0.75 an median. The perceptron reached a median sensitivity of 0.81 and a median specificity of 0.71.