A neural network approach was applied for the differential diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases. The neural network was designed for distinguishing between 9 types of interstitial lung diseases based on 20 items of clinical and radiographic information. A database for training and testing the neural network was created with 10 hypothetical cases for each of the 9 diseases. The performance of the neural network was evaluated by ROC analysis. The optimal parameters for the current neural network were determined by selecting those yielding the highest ROC curves. In this case the neural network consisted of one hidden layer including 6 units and was trained with 200 learning iterations. When the decision performances of the neural network chest radiologists and senior radiology residents were compared the neural network indicated high performance comparable to that of chest radiologists and superior to that of senior radiology residents. Our preliminary results suggested strongly that the neural network approach had potential utility in the computer-aided differential diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases. 1_© (1990) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.