Banzai News and Events

2010
K4CARE at URVactiv@
Web: web site, local mirror

Summary:  The K4CARE project is disseminated (in Catalan) to the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona) community.


13th CCIA
Web: web site

Summary
:  The main objective of the Congress is to foster discussion about the last works in artificial intelligence that have been developed within the research communitiy in the Catalan Countries, and for all the membrers of this community to meet.


K4CARE eHealth EU Month Focus
Web: contents, EU eHealth

Summary
:  TheK4CARE Project has been awarded as the project of Februrary in the Month Focus by the eHealth European Commission.
2010
2nd KR4HC Workshop
Web: workshop, ECAI10

Summary:  The 2nd International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care is organized in conjunction with the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2010).
2010

Springer LNAI 5943
Knowledge Representation for Health Care
Web: book, contentsSpringer

Summary:  This book is the result of merging two workshops series, namely one on computerized guidelines and protocols and the other one on knowledge management for health care procedures. The merge resulted in the KR4HC workshop: Knowledge Representation for Health-Care: Data, Processes, and Guidelines. This workshop was held in conjunction with the 12th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 09), held in Verona, Italy. The book included, in addition to the full-length workshop papers, invited peer-reviewed advanced papers on lessons learned in these  fields.
2009
The Banzai Group in La Vanguardia
December 10, 2009.

Summary: the reseach Group on Artificial Intelligence (Banzai) at the Rovira i Virgili University was funded in 1998, since then their members have been working in the application of computer-based knowledge management technologies to medicine. This press article summarizes the past, the present and the future of the group.
2009
1st Prize ACIA Awards (Premis ACIA)
Web: ACIA, 2009 ACIA Awards.

Summary: Mr. Joan Albert López-Vallverdú, one of the members of the Banzai Research Group, won the First prize of the 2009 ACIA Awards for his Master Thesis "Background knowledge to improve the induction of decision structures in medicine" (Advisor: David Riaño).
2009
Workshop at AIME
Knowledge Representation for Health Care
Web: workshop, AIME09

Summary
As computerised health-care support systems are rapidly becoming more knowledge intensive, the representation of medical knowledge in a form that enables reasoning is growing in relevance and taking a more central role in the area of medical informatics. In order to achieve a successful decision-support and knowledge management approach to medical knowledge representation, the scientific community has to provide efficient representations, technologies, and tools to integrate all the important elements that physicians work with: electronic health records and health-care information systems, clinical practice guidelines and standardized medical technologies, codification standards, etc.
Synergies to integrate the above mentioned elements and types of knowledge must be sought both in the medical problems (e.g., prevention, diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, etc.) and also in the CS and AI technologies (e.g., natural language processing, digital libraries, knowledge representation, knowledge integration and merging, decision support systems, machine learning, e-learning, etc.).
2009

Springer LNAI 5626
Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures
Web: book, contentsSpringer

Summary: LNAI 5626 contains extended versions of  10 accepted papers of the ECAI Workshop K4HelP'08 together with two invited papers. It is structured in three sections: technologies to manage health care procedural knowledge, methodologies to manage health care procedural knowledge, and computer systems to manage health care procedural knowledge.
2008
Workshop at ECAI
Knowledge Management for Health Care Processes
Web: workshop, ECAI08

SummaryE-health is a challenging topic that has deserved much attention at the scientific, technological, political, and social levels in Europe and worldwide. The introduction of new technologies in healthcare centers and national systems is interpreted by medical doctors as a first approach to the introduction of healthcare e-Services, and ultimately to the development of knowledge-based healthcare e-services.
From a medical point of view, healthcare processes are about preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic tasks. This workshop is concerned about the sorts of knowledge these processes require, their formal representation and exploitation, the elicitation of these sorts of knowledge, their mutual interaction and with other typical healthcare IT as Electronic Healthcare Records and Healthcare Computer Systems.
Knowledge Management for Healthcare Processes is a new workshop in a series of workshops and publications devoted to the formalization, organization, and deployment of procedural knowledge in healthcare. Previous workshops and publications have been the IEEE CBMS 2007 special track on "Machine Learning and Management of Healthcare Procedural Knowledge", the AIME 2007 workshop entitled "From Medical Knowledge to Global Healthcare", and Springer's LNCS4924.
2008

Springer LNAI 4924
Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures
Web: book, contentsSpringer


Summary
: Publication of 13 relevant papers on Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures, edited by David Riaño in Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.
2007

K2C Workshop at AIME
From Knowledge to Global Health Care
Web: workshop, AIME07


Summary
: When applied to medicine, Artificial Intelligence traditionally aims at providing solutions to concrete medical problems in decision support in diagnosis, treatment or prognosis, but never to support health care as a whole multi-disciplinary collaborative and multi-located process. Knowledge is, surely, a central component in the construction of future Information Society Technologies (IST) health care systems that shall be sustained on the combination of several components as computer-interpretable versions of bio-medical Ontologies, Electronic Health Care Records, and Clinical Practice Guidelines.

2007

Special track at CBMS
Machine Learning and Management of Health-Care Procedural Knowledge
Web: track, CBMS07

Summary: Health Informatics (HI) has progressed to become the field that applies Computer Science technologies, resources, devices and methods to health and biomedicine in order to deal with the requirements of data and information; including, for example, health-care Data Bases and Electronic Health-Care Records. The evolution of fields like Knowledge Management (KM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is extending this definition of HI with the capability of computers to represent, acquire, validate and use health-care knowledge, starting a process that will make Information Society to evolve towards a knowledge society in the forthcoming years.
The KM classification of knowledge distinguishes between descriptive knowledge (or know-what) and procedural knowledge (or know-how). In the health-care setting, descriptive knowledge asserts what the facts involved in health-care and their interactions are, whereas procedural knowledge asserts how processes and strategies of a health-care system are. These processes and strategies comprise actuation protocols at the organisational level, formal intervention plans at the medical and surgical levels, and individual plans describing personalised assistance.
The idiosyncrasy of procedural knowledge allows its generation not only as a result of a knowledge acquisition process, but also as the outcome of applying machine learning algorithms to healthcare data sources where the information about already performed medical procedures have been stored.
This track aims at binging together researchers in the area of using machine learning algorithms to yield procedural knowledge in medicine.