Detection of Breast Cancer using Neural Networks – A Review

Artificial neural network has been a widely used tool in various fields of medical and engineering applications as an intelligent tool, such as artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, medical diagnosis, machine learning and many more. Breast cancer classification is medical applications that possess great challenge for scientists and researchers. Neural network has become a very popular tool in diagnosis of breast cancer and classification of cancer datasets. Breast Cancer is one of the fatal diseases causing more number of deaths in women. For early and efficient diagnosis of breast cancer more and more techniques are being developed. Classical methods required cytopathologists or oncologists to examine the breast lesions for detection and classification of various stages of the cancer. Artificial neural network is a branch of artificial intelligence and has been widely accepted as a new technology in computer science. In carcinogenesis, artificial neural networks have been successfully applied to the problems in both pre-clinical and post-clinical diagnosis. Key-words: Neural network, breast cancer diagnosis, medical decision making, back propagation, decision support system.