Important dates

• Submission deadline:
  (ext. abstracts/full papers) 12 September 1997
• Notification of acceptance: 29 September 1997
• Conference: 1 - 4 April 1998
• Special issue of AIM journal: winter 1998

In recent years several methods and techniques from the fields of artificial intelligence, decision theory and statistics have been introduced into models of the medical management of patients (diagnosis, treatment, follow-up); in some of these models, assessment of the expected prognosis constitutes an integral part. Typically, recent prognostic methods rely on explicit (patho)physiological models, which may be combined with traditional models of life expectancy. Examples of such domain models are causal disease models, and physiological models of regulatory mechanisms in the human body. Such model-based approaches have the potential to facilitate the development of knowledge-based systems, because the medical domain models can be (partially) obtained from the medical literature.

Various methods have been suggested for the representations of such domain models ranging from quantitative and probabilistic approaches to symbolic and qualitative ones. Semantic concepts such as time, e.g. for modelling the progressive changes of regulatory mechanisms, have formed an important and challenging modelling issue. Moreover, automatic learning techniques of such models have been proposed. When model construction is hard, less explicit domain models have been studied such as the use of case-based representations and its combination with more explicit domain models.

This invited session aims at bringing together various theoretical and practical approaches to computational prognosis, possibly in the medical setting of diagnosis and therapy planning, that comprise the state of the art in this field. Papers are sought that describe medical prognosis applications using methods and techniques from artificial intelligence, decision theory, and statistics as well as papers proposing theoretical foundations of such methods. The session will also include one or more invited talks (details will appear in due time on the corresponding WWW-page of this session).

The best papers will entitle their authors to an invitation to submit an extended paper for a special issue on Intelligent Prognostic Methods in Medicine of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

Topics of interest

• Modelling and Reasoning:
  • ontologies for the specification of medical domain models
  • the specification of prognostic models, possibly as part of diagnostic or therapy-planning applications
  • representation and reasoning about (multiple) model types such as empirical, anatomical and (patho)physiological ones
  • representation of and reasoning with time
  • qualitative representation and reasoning
  • (dynamic) probabilistic networks
  • decision analytical modelling
  • function-based representation and reasoning
  • case-based representation and reasoning

• Knowledge Acquisition:
  • acquisition of the medical prognostic models
  • automated learning of domain or task models using machine learning techniques

• Use and Reuse of Prognostic Models in:
  • development of medical guidelines and protocols
  • medical diagnostic systems
  • treatment selection and planning systems

• Formalisation:
  • use of logical, set-theoretical or probabilistic methods to formalise various aspects of prognosis and therapy planning

• Medical Applications:
  • clinical context of actual prognostic models
  • role of prognostic models in diagnosis or treatment planning of a specific disease
  • evaluation of prognostic models

Time schedule and publication

• Submission deadline: 12 September 1997
• Notification of acceptance: 29 September 1997
• Camera ready version: 15 January 1998
• Conference: 1 - 4 April 1998
• Special issue of AIM Journal: winter 1998

Instructions to authors

Authors planning to submit a paper to the invited session, and hence indirectly to the special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine are requested to contact one of the co-chairs as soon as possible.

Session organization

Programme committee

For more information about the invited session, the conference, or the special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine please contact one of the co-chairs.

Ameen Abu-Hanna Dept. of Medical Informatics Academic Medical Center University of Amsterdam Meibergdreef 15 1105 AZ Amsterdam The Netherlands Telephone: +31 20 5664511 Fax : +31 20 6912432 A.Abu-Hanna@amc.uva.nl

Peter Lucas Dept. of Computer Science Utrecht University Padualaan 14 3584 CH Utrecht The Netherlands Telephone: +31 30 2534094 Fax: +31 30 2513791 lucas@cs.ruu.nl