Qualitative morphological analysis of muscle biopsies using neural networks

Qualitative data from human muscle biopsies have been extracted and analyzed by artificial neural network (ANN) models trained with the Kohonen´s self-organizing feature maps algorithm to provide an automated medical diagnosis. Data from 6 distinct groups of neuromuscular disorders were examined. Training and evaluation were carried out on 80 and 25 cases respectively. The diagnostic performance of models investigated varied form 87 to 95%, and 88 to 92% for the training and evaluation. Furthermore, the diagnostic usefulness of the self-organizing feature map models was tested on 11 muscle biopsies with no specific diagnostic findings that gave encouraging results.