Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the art of creating intelli­gent machines. It divides more or less into two schools: symbolic AI and compu­tational intelli­gence. Symbolic AI is one of the oldest approaches within AI. It deals with expert systems, case-based reasoning (CBR), behavioural AI and Bayesian networks. Compu­tatio­nal intelli­gence is a more recent approach. It covers neural networks, evolu­tionary models and fuzzy systems. Robotics completes AI with real world inter­action.

Medical informatics (MI) is a growing science developing methods for medical data pro­cess­ing. It covers a variety of disciplines: medical classi­fication and coding, medical image pro­cessing, medical decision support and depart­ment systems, bio­sta­tis­tics and bio­signal analysis, health infor­mation systems, medi­cal com­puter-based edu­cation and training, clinical support systems, medical tele­commu­nica­tion, net­working, mole­cular bio­infor­matics etc. Besides, MI supports medical docu­mentation.

Medical artificial intelligence (MAI) started with AI programs that performed dia­gnosis and recommen­ded therapies. This focus has broadened meanwhile. Today, medical arti­ficial intelli­gence covers also moni­toring, infor­mation retrieval, image pro­cess­ing and recog­nition, labo­ratory infor­mation systems, medical edu­cation, and much more. Due to its objec­tive, medical arti­ficial intelli­gence is the inter­section of infor­mation science, arti­ficial intell­igence, medi­cine and health care.

Services of this Site

Meva. Medical information retrieval is one of the fastest-growing MAI disci­plines. Due to the elec­tronic availa­bility of more and more articles, scien­tists are able to retrieve infor­mation of interest in short time. With PubMeds database, the scien­tific commu­nity can access over 12 million cita­tions to date! But a simple search in PubMed will often result in a very long cita­tion list which is hard to analyse. Iden­tifi­cation of insti­tutio­nal or author profiles by counting cita­tion fields will be time-consuming. On this site, you can use Meva to solve this problem. Meva is a MEDLINE post-processor, a medical data mining service analysing PubMed literature search results from PubMed. Meva condenses the endless list of a MEDLINE retrieval outcome into a well-structured result, showing a graphical represen­tation of counts and relations of biblio­graphic Med­Line fields […]

Cypper. Biotransformation is the process of chemical modification within the body on compounds. The metabolism of food, drugs and toxins is an example of a bio­trans­forma­tion, catalysed by enzymes, which resides mostly inside the liver. As a rule, the resul­ting substan­ces are more water-soluble and thus, can be excreted by the kidneys. Most of these enzymes contain a protein called cytochrome P450. The cata­lytic acti­vity of cyto­chrome P450 enzymes may strongly differ between indivi­duals. Besides, many drugs may increase or decrease the cata­lytic acti­vity of these enzymes which can lead to unfore­seen conse­quences, e.g. drug inter­actions resul­ting in over­dosage. Cypper tries to test some of the most important clinical drugs which may be subject to an altered plasma concen­tration due to inter­actions or genetic alter­ations […]

Intelligent agents. Besides, some “classic” AI programs are provided by this site. Chat bots (avatars) can act as an intelligent human-com­puter inter­face. Eliza is probably the most famous example for such a bot, acting as an arti­ficial therapist. Eliza could be pretty much convin­cing sometimes and get the people writing to her become emo­tio­nally involved. It was one of the first AI programs in the sixties and shows some fasci­nating aspects, so it is still worth studying its behaviour. The bot tries to rephrase the questions of the client and reacts on certain keywords. If no keyword is found, Eliza replies with fixed phrases to keep the con­ver­sation going. The Eliza bot on this site is in parts a recrea­tion of the original bot to demon­strate its funda­mental behaviour […]