Agent Technology and e-Health [Paperback]

Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. This book reports on the results achieved in this area, discusses the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains and society, and also provides a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future to make the deployment of health-care agent-based systems a reality. Current topics of research include communication and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care.

Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last ten years there has been a growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care. Moreover, a growing European community of researchers interested in the application of intelligent agents in health care emerged as a result of the activities within the AgentCities.NET European network and the AgentLink III Technical Forum Group on Healthcare Applications of Intelligent Agents. And specially in R&D projects funded during the FP6. Thus, this book reports on the results achieved in this area, discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains and society, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future to make the deployment of health-care agent-based systems a reality. Current topics of research include communication and co-operation betweendistributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from the Internet, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring and diagnosis. A lot of methodological and technical problems are beginning to be discovered by the researchers that attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, there does not exist a universally accepted standard medical ontologylı