The Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering research reports offer a forum for the research output of the academic staff and research students of the Department at the University of Sheffield. Papers are reviewed for quality and presentation by a departmental editor. However, the contents and opinions expressed remain the responsibility of the authors. Some papers in the series may have been subsequently published elsewhere and you are advised to cite the later published version in these instances. ing a Decision Support System for the Histopathalogical Diagnosis of Chronic Idiopathic Inflammatory Bowel Disease- Comparison of Radial Basis Function Neural Networks and Logistic Regression

The medical problem domain that is investigated i this study is the histopathological diagnosis of chronic idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease (CIBD). CIBD is a generic category that describes diseases of the bowel which are characterised by acute and chronic inflammation and which have no identified aetiological agent (such as an infective agent) The two major diseases within this category are ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease. Both diseases are chronic conditions characterised by periods of relapse and remission and may produce life threatening complications such as intestinal perforation, sepsis and carcinoma. Many conditions mimic the clinical symptoms of CIBID (Farmer, 1990: Hamilton 1987: Moxon et al. 1994 Shepherd 1991: Shivananda et al. 1991: Suarwicz et al. 1994) and thus histopathalogical examination of colorectal biopsies is important, both in confirming the diagnosis and in excluding other conditions such as infective colitis...........