Fusion of artificial neural networks for learning capability enhancement: Application to medical image classification

Artificial neural network (ANN) is one of the commonly used tools for computational applications. The specific advantages of ANN are high accuracy, less convergence time, less computational complexity, and so forth. However, all these merits are not available in the same ANN. Even though back propagation neural (BPN) networks are accurate, their computational complexity is significantly high. BPN networks are also not stable. On the other hand, Hopfield neural network (HNN) is better than BPN in terms of computational efficiency. But the accuracy of HNN is low. In this work, a modified ANN is proposed to overcome this specific problem. The modified ANN is a fusion of BPN and HNN. The technical concepts of BPN and HNN are mixed in the training algorithm of the proposed back propagation-Hopfield network (BPHN). The objective of this fusion is to improve the performance of conventional ANN. Magnetic resonance brain image classification experiments are used to analyse the proposed BPHN. Experimental results have suggested improvement in the learning process of the proposed BPHN. A comparative analysis with the conventional networks is performed to validate the performance of the proposed approach.