Operations research aims to assist managers faced with problems of coordinating activities; improving the quality of care of services delivered; making optimal resource allocation decisions and generally, managing services and institutions. Operations research (or O.R.) was originally developed in response to the problems of the second World War. It was characterised then by a unifying and clear objective; clear problems that had to be solved and the use of inter-disciplinary teams to analyse and solve identified problems. This analysis often drew on mathematical techniques. After the war,...

The Working Group 5 of the International Medical Informatics Associ- ation (IMIA) dedicates its work to information systems in primary and ambulatory care. The first conference of this Working Group in Hanno- ver in 1980 produced a review of the state of the art of that time and gave perspectives for future development (Rienhoff, O. and Abrams, M.E. (eds.): The Computer in the Doctor's Office, Horth- Holland, Amsterdam: 1980). In the meantime, a rapid development has taken place. Therefore it seemed appropriate to hold another working conference which was con- ducted in Munich, December 2-6,...

As research on expert systems has moved well into its second decade, it has become popular to cite the limitations of the phenomenologic or associational approach to knowledge representation that was typical of first generation systems. For example, the Internist-1 knowledge base represents explicitly over 600 diseases, encoding associated disease manifestations (signs, symptoms, physical findings, and lab abnormalities) but failing to deal with the reasons that those findings may be present in the disease [Miller, R. A. 82]. In recent years Pople has sought to add detailed causal models to...

Medical information systems such as Radiology Management Information Systems (RIS), Picture Archiving and Communications (PACS) and Hospital Information Systems (HIS) will soon be standard tools to support routine work in hospitals. An interface between PACS/RIS and RIS/HIS is increasingly necessary in order to co-ordinate the flow of information throughout these systems. This book discusses a systematic analysis of interfacing strategies. An introduction is given to the status of present radiology departments and trends for the future. Then, to define a PACS-RIS interface in a multivendor...

Contains the proceedings of a conference which explored contemporary research in the field of artificial intelligence in medicine. The contributors discussed methodology, knowledge representation, clinical applications, modelling, uncertainty management, knowledge acquisition and more.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Tenth International Congress on Medical Informatics, MIE 91, that will be held in Vienna, Austria, August 19-22, 1991. The MIE 91 Congress was organized by the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) in cooperation with the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and the Austrian Society for Biomedi- cal Engineering (OGBMT). It follows the previous congresses in Cambridge (1978), Berlin (1979), Toulouse (1981), Dublin (1982), Brussels (1984), Helsinki (1985), Rome (1987), Oslo (1988), and the Congress 1990 in Glasgow. The proceedings contain 199...

The 33rd Annual Meeting of the German Association for Medical Documentation, Informatics and Statistics was combined with a Special Topic Conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics and takes place at Hannover, F. R. of Germany, from September 26 to 29, 1988. It was planned and initililly prepared by the late Prof. P. L Reichertz, who headed the Hannover institute from 1969 to 1987. To commemorate his contribution to the development of medicine the conference was devoted to him "Peter Reichertz Memorial Conference on Expert Systems and Decision Support in Medicine" Since...

The Second European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine followed the successful meeting in Marseilles in 1987. As for AIME 87, the goal of AIME 89 was to promote scientific interchange within and between all subfields of AI in medicine, among researchers from all over the world, and especially from Europe. There were sessions on: knowledge elicidation and acquisition, architectures for medical knowledge-based systems, clinical applications, methodology, reasoning based on physiological models, and uncertainty. It is clear form the quality of papers presented, that the rate of...

Reports on the conference held at the Aspen Institute in August 1989 on dental informatics which aimed to define the parameters of this field across all levels of dental organizations and activities. The contributors intended to address dental practice, education, and research.

The software has been developed in Smalltalk80 1] on SUN and Apple Macintosh computers. Smalltalk80 is an object-oriented programming system which permits rapid prototyping. The need for prototyping in the specification of general practitioner systems was highlighted as long ago as 1980 4] and is essential to the user -centred philosophy of the project. The goal is a hardware independent system usable on any equipment capable of supporting an integrated environment for handling both textual and graphics and 'point and select' interaction. The architecture is extensible and provides a...