Neural computation in medicine: Perspectives and prospects

In 1998, over 400 papers on artificial neural networks (ANNs) were published in the context of medicine, but why is there this interest in ANNs? And how do ANNs compare with traditional statistical methods? We propose some answers to these questions, and go on to consider the ‘black box’ issue. Finally, we briefly look at two directions in which ANNs are likely to develop, namely the use of Bayesian statistics and knowledge data fusion