A Neural-Network Based System on the World Wide Web for Prognosis and Indication of Surgery in Head and Brain Trauma

Background . Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been used with success to implement medical decision making systems in many areas (Sabbatini, 1992), particularly in those applications where pattern recognition is required. A typical application involves dozens of input variables, which are associated in a linear or non-linear way to predict one or few output variables, using as the knowledge base several hundreds or thousands of examples (‘cases’) taken from the real world. This is the case of the application reported here, which had the aim of developing an useful and reliable model for making simple prognosis of patients with head/brain trauma, using ANNs, as well as for providing the indication for need of surgery. In order to experiment with a vehicle for making available the final decision-support tool to users in an Intranet or in the Internet, we have also developed an interactive hypertext system in HTML and Perl.