[en] The shaping of non-circular plasmas requires a non-linear mapping between the measured diagnostic signals and selected equilibrium parameters. The particular configuration of Neural Network known as the multi-layer perceptron provides a powerful and general technique for formulating an arbitrary continuous non-linear multi-dimensional mapping. This technique has been successfully applied to the extraction of equilibrium parameters from measurements of single-null diverted plasmas in the DIII-D tokamak; the results are compared with a purely linear mapping. The method is promising, and hardware implementation is straightforward. (author) 15 refs., 7 figs