An Introduction to Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: New Directions

Computational intelligence paradigms offer tremendous advantages in many areas including healthcare, engineering, science and management. This chapter presents a brief introduction to computational intelligence in healthcare.

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Decision Systems Group, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School Adelaide South Australia School of Electrical & Information Engineering, University of South Australia

Summary. Computational intelligence paradigms offer tremendous advantages in many areas including healthcare, engineering, science and management. This chapter presents a brief introduction to computational intelligence in healthcare.

1.1 Introduction Computers are seamlessly integrated in all realms of our daily lives and the amount of information they capture is staggering. This poses tremendous challenges to our ability to not only store data, but more importantly, to process such vast information to extract meaningful knowledge. This is particularly true in healthcare where computers have been used to obtain patient information, and assist physicians in making difficult clinical decisions. Computational Intelligence rises to the imperative challenge of implementing robust computer applications to foster healthcare safety, quality and efficacy. An emerging discipline, Computational Intelligence (CI) comprises computational models and theories that draw inspiration from neurocognitive and biological functions. Unlike traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) which mainly focuses on high-cognition formalisms and reasoning about symbolic representations, CI focuses on low-level cognitive functions such as perception and control [1]. In this chapter we seek to provide the reader with an introduction to the three core disciplines of Computational Intelligence, namely Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and Fuzzy Logic. We devote a section to the discussion of a series of Computational Intelligence applications developed over the past several years to aid the healthcare community in various aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of illnesses. We conclude this chapter with a summary of the latest advances of Computational Intelligence in Healthcare, as presented in this book. We hope that the work presented in this book will encourage readers to immerse in this field and further explore the possibilities that lay ahead. M. Sordo et al.: An Introduction to Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: New Directions, Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) 107, 1–26 (2008) c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008 www.springerlink.com 

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M. Sordo et al.

1.2 Computational Intelligence An emerging discipline, Computational Intelligence (CI) comprises computational models and theories that draw inspiration from neurocognitive and biological functions. Unlike traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) which mainly focuses on high-cognition formalisms and reasoning about symbolic representations, CI focuses on low-level cognitive functions such as perception and control [1]. According to the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, the field of Computational Intelligence comprises three core disciplines and their applications: • • •

Neural Networks are computational paradigms based on mathematical models with strong pattern recognitio