Application of evolutionary programming and probabilistic neural networks to breast cancer diagnosis

Two novel artificial neural network techniques, evolutionary programming (EP) and probabilistic neural networks (PNN), were applied to the problem of breast cancer diagnosis. The EP is a stochastic optimization technique with the ability to mutate both network connections and weight values. The PNN has the ability to produce optimal Bayesian decision making given sufficient training data. Both techniques offer potential improvements over the well-studied, classic backpropagation networks. Preliminary performances of these new techniques were comparable to but slightly worse than the classic networks. In on-going work, these new techniques will be optimized further and should produce results greater than or equal to the classic networks, but with more information content and confidence.