Diagnosing coronary artery disease with a backpropagation neural network: Lessons learned

Conference · Sun Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1995

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1097/00003072-199409000-00052· OSTI ID:377064

Turner, D D ^[1]; Holmes, E R ^[2]

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1. Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
2. Sacred Heart Medical Center, Spokane, WA (United States)

The SPECT (single photon emitted computed tomography) procedure, while widely used for diagnosing coronary artery disease, is not a perfect technology. We have investigated using a backpropagation neural network to diagnose patients suffering from coronary artery disease that is independent from the SPECT procedure. The raw thallium-201 scintigrams produced before the SPECT tomographic reconstruction were used as input patterns for the backpropagation neural network, and the diagnoses resulting mainly from cardiac catheterization as the desired outputs for each pattern. Several preprocessing techniques were applied to the scintigrams, in an attempt to improve the information to noise ratio. After using the a procedure that extracted a subimage containing the heart from each scintigram, we used a data reduction technique, thereby encoding the scintigram in 12 values, which were the inputs to the backpropagation neural network. The network was then trained. This network per-formed superbly for patients suffering from inferolateral disease (classifying 10 out of 10 correctly), but performance was less than optimal for cases involving other coronary zones. While the scope of this project was limited to diagnosing coronary artery disease, this initial work can be extended to other medical imaging procedures, such as diagnosing breast cancer from a mammogram and evaluating lung perfusion studies.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
• OSTI ID: 377064
• Report Number(s): PNL-SA--26375; CONF-9503142--; ON: DE96009360
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

55 BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
BASIC STUDIES
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES
CORONARIES
DIAGNOSTIC TECHNIQUES
NEURAL NETWORKS