Training neural networks as experimental models: Classifying biomedical datasets for sickle cell disease

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of various type of neural network architectures for the classification of medical data. Extensive research has indicated that neural networks generate significant improvements when used for the preprocessing of medical time-series data signals and have assisted in obtaining high accuracy in the classification of medical data. Up to date, most of hospitals and healthcare sectors in the United Kingdom are using manual approach for analysing patient input for sickle cell disease, which depends on clinician’s experience that can lead to time consuming and stress to patients. The results obtained froma range of models during our experiments have shown that the proposed Back-propagation trained feed-forward neural network classifier generated significantly better outcomes over the other range of classifiers. Using the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, experiments results showed the following outcomes for our models, in order of best to worst: Back-propagation trained feed-forward neural net classifier: 0.989, Functional Link Neural Network: 0.972, in comparison to the Radial basis neural Network Classifiers with areas of 0.875, and the Voted Perception classifier: 0.766. A Linear Neural Network was used as baseline classifier to illustrate the importance of the previous models, producing an area of 0.849, followed by a random guessing model with an area of 0.524.