For many animal diseases it is essential to predict when an animal will develop the disease. based on current characteristics of the animal.  In the case of canine hip dysplasia, for instance,  it is important to predict at young age (typically based on radiographs) when the dog will develop symptoms of hip dysplasia. This enables the owner to take correct decisions with respect to including the dog in a breeding program and to train the dog to become a working dog, e.g., blind guide dog.

The modelling of time to event is typically based on survival analysis techniques  that have been developed in the field of statistics. The objective of the current project is to combine such survival analysis techniques with artificial intelligence,  mainly neural networks. Neural networks will thus be  extended so that they can also be used to predict time to event.