Case-Based Reasoning in the Health Sciences: Foundations and Research Directions - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 119

Over the past decade, seven Workshops on CBR in the Health Sciences have
been conducted at the International and European Conferences on Case-Based
Reasoning, and four special journal issues have been published on the topic
[2,3,4,5]. Today, CBR in the Health Sciences is a vibrant and rapidly growing
field of research and development.
This chapter presents an overview of the field, including its foundations, cur-
rent work, and research directions. The next section, Section 2, is an introduction
to CBR, including an overview of the Retrieve, Reuse, Revise, Retain reasoning
cycle [6], and a list of CBR resources. Section 3 describes health sciences domains
and their significance for computer science. In Section 4, the intersection of CBR
and the health sciences is discussed, including its rationale and historical roots.
Section 5 describes the impact of CBR in the Health Sciences and considers the
complementarity and synergies of CBR with statistics. In Section 6, research di-
rections are presented. Here, tasks, domains, and research themes are considered
in light of an extensive review and analysis of the CBR in the Health Sciences
literature. Section 7 considers the role of AI as a whole in the health sciences,
exploring CBR's synergies with data mining and knowledge discovery, and dis-
cussing CBR's role in multimodal reasoning architectures. Section 8 presents a
summary and conclusion.
Resources. Several comprehensive overview articles have been published on
CBR in the Health Sciences [1,7,8,9,10]. There have also been special journal
issues devoted to this topic in Applied Intelligence [2], Artificial Intelligence
in Medicine [3], and Computational Intelligence [4,5]. A series of seven Work-
shops on CBR in the Health Sciences was held between 2003 and 2009 at the
International and European Conferences on CBR. Many of the workshop pro-
ceedings are available online at http://www.cbr-biomed.org/jspw/workshops/.
CBR-BIOMED, http://www.cbr-biomed.org/, is a web site dedicated to CBR
in biology and medicine.
2 Foundations of Case-Based Reasoning
CBR uses past experiences, or cases, to help in solving new problems or under-
standing unfamiliar situations. It is based on the premise that human knowl-
edge and expertise is experiential in nature. Clearly, people are better able to
accomplish tasks with which they have familiarity, whether in everyday life or
in professional settings. For example, in driving to the home of a friend for the
first time, you may need to consult a map, ask for directions, use a global po-
sitioning system, or otherwise attend to the route, to ensure that you arrive at
the right place at the right time. If you are told that your friend lives a few
blocks from some familiar landmark, like a favorite restaurant, the task becomes
easier, because you already know most of the route. You do not expend much
mental effort at all when driving a well-traveled route, such as between your
home and oce. Similarly, we expect professionals with greater relevant expe-
rience to perform complex tasks better than novices. For example, if a traveler