Abstract
Substantial amounts of biomedical data are being accumulated every year. Large datasets are accumulated in specialized repositories, electronic document management systems, medical information systems, and other repositories. Classical statistical analysis does not always provide opportunities for analysis of these large datasets; therefore, intelligent data analysis (IDA) is becoming more popular in biomedical research. This paper is an introduction to artificial neural networks - one of the most popular methods of IDA. An artificial neural network is an attempt to build a mathematical analog of the brain and mathematically simulate the transmission of a nerve impulse between neurons. We present an example of the application of artificial neural networks in medical research using SPSS and Statistica software packages. The article describes a medical research question, an example of a dataset and a guide on construction and training of an artificial neural network as well as interpretation of the results.