Neural Networks in Medicine

Automatic detection of tumours in the bile ducts of the liver is very difficult as often, in the de-facto non-invasive diagnostic images using magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP), tumours are not clearly visible. Specialists use their experience in anatomy to diagnose a tumour by absence of expected structures in the images. Naturally, undertaking such diagnosis is very difficult for an automated system. This chapter proposes an algorithm that is based on a combination of the manual diagnosis principles along with nature-inspired image processing techniques and artificial neural networks (ANN) to assist in the preliminary diagnosis of tumours affecting the bile ducts in the liver. The results obtained show over 88% success rate of the system developed using an ANN with the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) architecture, in performing the difficult automated preliminary detection of the tumours, even in the robust clinical test images with other biliary diseases present.