Applications of Neural Networks in Biomedical Data Analysis

Neural networks for deep-learning applications, also called artificial neural networks, are important tools in science and industry. While their widespread use was limited because of inadequate hardware in the past, their popularity increased dramatically starting in the early 2000s when it became possible to train increasingly large and complex networks. Today, deep learning is widely used in biomedicine from image analysis to diagnostics. This also includes special topics, such as forensics. In this review, we discuss the latest networks and how they work, with a focus on the analysis of biomedical data, particularly biomarkers in bioimage data. We provide a summary on numerous technical aspects, such as activation functions and frameworks. We also present a data analysis of publications about neural networks to provide a quantitative insight into the use of network types and the number of journals per year to determine the usage in different scientific fields.