[UAI] 2nd CfP: ECAI'06 workshop on "AI techniques in healthcare: evidence-based guidelines and protocols" 

                                       CALL FOR PAPERS:

                                     ECAI'06 Workshop on

         "AI techniques in healthcare: evidence-based guidelines and  
protocols"

                                      Italy, August 29, 2006

                               Submission deadline: April 15, 2006


http://www.cs.vu.nl/~annette/ECAI06-WS-CfP.html



DESCRIPTION

In recent years, medical guidelines and protocols have become the main
instruments for disseminating best practices in clinical medicine.
They promote safe practices, reduce inter-clinician practice
variations and support decision-making in patient care while
containing the costs of care. So far, they have been proved useful in
improving the quality and consistency of healthcare, by supporting
healthcare quality assessment and assurance, clinical decision,
workflow and resource management, etc. The benefits of using
clinical guidelines are widely recognized, yet the guideline development
process is time- and resource-consuming, and the size and complexity of
guidelines remains a major hurdle for effectively using them in clinical
care.

This is why many organizations develop today computerized guidelines as
well as decision support systems that incorporate these guidelines.
Computerized protocols can be generated based on guidelines, ensuring
that at the point-of-care patient-specific evidence-based therapy
instructions that can be carried out with little or no inter-clinician
variability.

Several methods have been or are being developed to support the
development, deployment, maintenance and use of evidence-based
guidelines, using techniques from Artificial Intelligence, Software
Engineering, Medical Informatics and Formal Methods.  Such methods
employ different representation formalisms and computational techniques:
rule-based, logic-based, knowledge-based or workflow-based. Despite the
guideline-related research spanning a large range of the AI research
community, as well as other research areas, a comprehensive integration
of the results of these communities is still lacking.


AIM

        Due to the large interest in this inter-disciplinary effort to
        integrate the results of different communities on guideline
        development, deployment, and use, and following successes of
        similar workshops and conferences
        SCGP (http://www.onto-med.de/en/events/EWGLP2000/) Leipzig,  
2000,
        SCGP (http://euromise.vse.cz/cgp04/index.html), Prague, 2004,
        AIME Track (http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/aime05/), Aberdeen 2005,
        this workshop will bring together researchers from different
        branches of AI to examine cutting-edge approaches to guideline
        modeling and development and to consider how different
        communities can cooperate to address these challenges.

LIST of TOPICS

Original contributions are sought, regarding the development of theory,
techniques, and use cases of Artificial Intelligence in the area of
health care, particularly connected to guideline and protocols.
The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to, the
following areas:

- The use of ontologies, conceptual models and medical
    vocabularies  in computerized guidelines and protocols
- Standardization of guideline models and interfaces to clinical
    information systems
- Guideline mark-up languages, document models, and their uses
- Acquisition, refinement and exploration of the temporal aspect of
    guidelines and protocols
- Supporting the life cycle of guidelines and protocols
- Guideline workbenches and visualization methods
- Guideline and protocol validation and verification
- Use of formal and simulation techniques in computerized guidelines
- Use cases for computerized guidelines and protocols
- Integration of computerized guidelines and the care delivery process
- Use of guidelines for quality assessment and for critiquing
- Evaluation of quality and safety of computerized guidelines
- Medical decision support systems
- Machine learning methods, data mining and statistical
    models to support authoring and maintenance of medical protocols
- Tools for supporting authoring, execution and maintenance of
     protocols and guidelines
- Support for natural language generation and understanding in
    connection with medical protocols and guidelines
- Interoperability of clinical guidelines
- Knowledge management in guidelines and protocols
- Case-studies and overviews of modelling, simulation and verification
    frameworks for guidelines and protocols


SCHEDULE

Deadline for paper submissions: 15 April 2006
Notification of acceptance: 10 May 2006
Final camera-ready manuscripts: 24 May 2006
Workshop date: 29 August 2006

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submissions should be made by email to the workshop co-chair
Annette ten Teije (uyekdeg@cs.vu.nl) in PDF format, and should follow  
the
Springer format (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).

There are two categories of paper submissions:

- Full research papers (up to 10 pages)
- Short papers (up to 5 pages) that are
     - short research papers
     - demonstration of implemented systems

If sufficient quality is available among the workshop submissions,
we will investigate publication of selected papers as part of
the LNAI Springer series.


WORKSHOP ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Annette ten Teije, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands (co-chair)
Peter Lucas, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (co-chair)
Silvia Miksch, Vienna University of Technology & Danube University  
Krems, Austria (co-chair)

Contact details:
Annette ten Teije (uyekdeg@cs.vu.nl)

Department of AI, Faculty of Sciences,
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
de Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
tel (+31)-20-598 7721/7483


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Michael Balser, University of Augsburg, Germany
Paul de Clercq, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
Subrata Das, Charles River Analytics, USA
John Fox, Cancer Research, UK
David Glasspool, Cancer Research, UK
Robert Greenes, Harvard University, USA
Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Jim Hunter, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Mar Marcos, Universitat Jaum I, Castellon, Spain
Lucila Ohno-Machado, Harvard Medical School, USA
Mor Peleg, Haifa University, Israel
Silvana Quaglini, University of Pavia, Italy
Wolfgang Reif, University of Augsburg, Germany
Kitty Rosenbrand, Dutch Institute for Healthcare Improvement (CBO),  
The Netherlands
Radu Serban, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Brigitte Seroussi, STIM, DPA/DSI/AP-HP, France
Andreas Seyfang, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Yuval Shahar, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Paolo Terenziani, Univ. del Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro, Italy
Samson Tu, Stanford University, USA
Dongwen Wang, University of Rochester, USA
Jeremy Wyatt, National Institute of Clinical Excellence, UK


