Call for Papers

AAAI 1994 Spring Symposium:
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine:  Interpreting Clinical Data

(March 21-23, 1994, Stanford University, Stanford, CA)

The deployment of on-line clinical databases, many supplanting the 
traditional role of the paper patient chart, has increased rapidly 
over the past decade.  The consequent explosion in the quality and 
volume of available clinical data, along with an ever more stringent 
medicolegal obligation to remain aware of all implications of these 
data, has created a substantial burden for the clinician.  The 
challenge of providing intelligent tools to help clinicians monitor 
patient clinical courses, forecast likely prognoses, and discover 
new relational knowledge, is at least as large as that generated by 
the knowledge explosion which motivated earlier efforts in 
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM).  Whereas many of the 
pioneering programs worked on small data sets which were entered 
interactively by knowledge engineers or clinicians, the current 
generation of programs have to act on raw data, unfiltered and 
unmediated by human beings.  Interaction with human users typically 
only occurs on demand or on detection of clinically significant 
events.  The emphasis of this symposium will be on methodologies 
that provide robust autonomous performance in data-rich clinical 
environments ranging from busy outpatient practices to operating 
rooms and intensive care units. Relevant topics include intelligent 
alarming (including anticipation and prevention of adverse clinical 
events), data abstraction, sensor validation, preliminary event 
classification, therapy advice, critiquing, and assistance in the 
establishment and execution of clinical treatment protocols. 
Detection of temporal and geographical patterns of disease 
manifestations and machine learning of clinical patterns are also of 
interest.

Organizing committee

Isaac Kohane, Co-chair (Harvard Medical School)
Serdar Uckun, Co-chair (Stanford University)
Enrico Coiera (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories/Bristol)
Ramesh Patil (USC/Information Sciences Institute)
Mario Stefanelli (Universita di Pavia)

Format

Two large data samples are available to serve as training and test 
sets for various approaches to information management and to provide 
a common domain of discourse.  The samples include:

* A dense, high volume data set typical of a critical care 
environment.  This data set consist of hemodynamic measurements, 
mechanical ventilator settings, laboratory values including arterial 
blood gas measurements, and treatment information covering a 12-hour 
period of the ICU treatment of a patient with severe respiratory 
distress.

* A large number of sparse data sets representative of outpatient 
environments.  The data includes blood glucose measurements, 
treatment, and lifestyle information on 70 patients with diabetes 
mellitus.  Each patient record consists of several weeks' to months' 
worth of clinical information sampled at irregular intervals.  These 
sets are available immediately to be used as training cases.  For 
interested parties, 10 more case records will be made available two 
weeks prior to the symposium to be used as an optional testing set 
for various approaches.

The data samples and accompanying clinical information are available 
via anonymous ftp from HPP.Stanford.EDU (36.44.0.77) in the 
directory pub/AIM-94.  The data will also be made available on 
diskettes to participants who do not have Internet access.  It will 
be left to the discretion of the participants to use any subset of 
these samples to help focus their approaches and presentations.  The 
data can also be used as test vehicles for their own research and to 
create sample programs for demonstration at the symposium.  
Participants do not have to use the data in order to participate.  
However, the program committee will favor presentations which 
exploit the provided data sets in their analyses.

AIM-94 Matchmaker Service

We realize that an accurate interpretation of clinical data requires 
a thorough understanding of the physiological principles and clinical 
issues involved.  We also realize that many AIM researchers do not 
have convenient access to medical expertise, and that a symposium 
focusing on a clinical theme may catch several parties at a disadvantage.  
Conversely, some clinical researchers may be interested in participating 
but may not have collaborators on the computer science end of the field.  
To offset such disadvantages, we will provide a simple 'Matchmaker' 
service for AIM-94.  The purpose of this service is to establish a medium 
by which researchers can seek collaborators of complementary background 
and interests for AIM-94 participation and beyond.

If you are interested in participating in this program, send a
one-paragraph description of your background, research interests, and the
type of collaboration you are pursuing to <aim-94@camis.stanford.edu> by
September 20th.  We will collate these entries and distribute the whole
list to all participants of the program.  It will be the participants' 
responsibility to contact others to discuss and establish collaborative 
efforts; AIM-94 organizers will solely act as mediators.

Submission process

Potential participants are invited to submit abstracts no longer 
than 2 pages (< 1200 words) by October 15, 1993.  The abstracts 
should outline methodology and indicate, if applicable, how the 
provided data may be used as a proof-of-principle for the discussed 
methodology.  Electronic submissions are encouraged.  The abstracts 
may be sent in ASCII, RTF, or PostScript formats to <aim-
94@camis.stanford.edu>.  Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked 
to submit a working paper by January 31, 1994.  They will also be 
asked to prepare either a poster or an oral presentation.

Submissions by mail

Use this method ONLY IF you cannot submit an abstract 
electronically.  Fax submissions will not be accepted. Send 6 copies 
of the abstract to:

Serdar Uckun, MD, PhD
Co-chair, AIM-94
Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University 
701 Welch Road, Bldg. C 
Palo Alto, CA 94304, U.S.A.
Phone: [+1] (415) 723-1915
Fax: [+1] (415) 725-5850

Calendar

Abstracts due: 			October 15, 1993
Notification of authors by: 	November 15, 1993
Working papers due: 		January 31, 1994
Spring Symposium: 		March 21-23, 1994

Information

For further information, please contact the co-chairs at the address 
above or (preferably) via e-mail at: <aim-94@camis.stanford.edu>


