Preliminary steps towards efficient classification in large medical datasets: Structure optimization for deep learning networks through parallelized differential evolution

Deep Neural Networks are being more and more widely used to perform several tasks over highly-sized datasets, one of them being classification. Finding good configurations for Deep Neural Network structures is a very important problem in general, and particularly in the medical domain. Currently, either trial-and-error methodologies or sampling-based ones are considered. This paper describes some preliminary steps towards effectively facing this task. The first step consists in the use of Differential Evolution, a kind of an Evolutionary Algorithm. The second lies in using a parallelized version in order to reduce the turnaround time. The preliminary results obtained here show that this approach can be useful in easily obtaining structures that allow increases in the network accuracy with respect to those provided by humans.