A decision support tool for the diagnosis of breast cancer based upon fuzzy ARTMAP

This paper presents research into the application of the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network model to the diagnosis of cancer from fine-needle aspirates of the breast. Trained fuzzy ARTMAP networks are differently pruned so as to maximise accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The differently pruned networks are then employed in a 'cascade' of networks intended to separate cases into 'certain' and 'suspicious' classes. This mimics the predictive behaviour of a human pathologist, The fuzzy ARTMAP model also provides symbolic rule extraction facilities and the validity of the derived rules for this domain is discussed. Additionally results are provided showing the effects upon network performance of different input features and different observers. The implications of the findings are discussed.