Case-Based Reasoning in the Health Sciences: Foundations and Research Directions - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 122

into the very beginnings of the field. Good shorter overviews include Aamodt
and Plaza's paper [6], which introduced the CBR cycle discussed above, and
a tutorial introduction by Kolodner and Leake [13], which appears as a chap-
ter in [14]. In 2005, the CBR research community collaboratively published a
special issue of the Knowledge Engineering Review on CBR commentaries [15].
This issue catalogs important issues, trends, and techniques in CBR research
and development, providing extensive bibliographic references to relevant work
through that date. For the most up-to-date information on CBR as of this
writing, consult the CBR Wiki maintained by the CBR research community
at http://cbrwiki.fdi.ucm.es/wiki/. The latest advances in CBR research and
development are presented each year at the International Conference on CBR,
http://www.iccbr.org/.
3 Health Sciences Domains
The health sciences include medicine, nursing, and all other aspects of health-
care and health research, including human biology, genetics, proteomics, and
phylogenetics. In terms of computer science, forecasts for the development of
the profession confirm a general trend toward becoming increasingly influenced
by application areas. Key influential application areas are health informatics
and bioinformatics. For example, the National Workforce Center for Emerging
Technologies (NWCET) lists healthcare informatics and global and public health
informatics among such applications, as shown in Figure 2.
The predominant role played by health sciences sectors is confirmed by statis-
tics from the U.S. Department of Labor. Predicted to have some of the highest
increases in wage, salary and employment growth between 2006 and 2016 are
healthcare practitioner oces (close second overall rank), private hospitals (sixth
overall rank), residential care facilities (ninth overall), and home healthcare ser-
vices (twelfth overall). By comparison, amusement, gambling, and recreational
services rank only thirteenth [17].
The strength of health related industries is in response to a need for in-
creased access to healthcare. This social need also fosters research funding and
Fig. 2. Influential application areas for computer science identified by the NWCET,
from [16]