CFP:

["Huhns, Michael" <huhns@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

                 Call for Papers
           IEEE Intelligent Systems
Special Issue on Intelligent Agents in Healthcare

Healthcare is a vast open environment characterized by shared and
distributed decision making and management of care. It requires the
communication of complex and diverse forms of information among a
variety of clinical and other settings, as well as coordination among
groups of healthcare professionals with very different skills and roles.
It has been argued in recent years that intelligent agents' basic
properties (autonomy, proactivity, and social ability) and multiagent
systems' main features (management of distributed information, and
communication and coordination between separate autonomous entities)
make these techniques good options for solving problems in this domain.
This special issue aims to provide empirical confirmations of this
claim, by presenting successful applications of agent technology in any
healthcare-related area (for example, diagnosis, monitoring, scheduling,
and decision support systems).

Submitted papers should address at least one of these issues:
* Successful application of agents and multiagent systems in healthcare
(this is the preferred topic).
* Cooperation between intelligent agents to improve patient management
(for example, distributed patient scheduling).
* Agents that deliver remote or elderly care (for example, home care).
* Agents that provide information about medical services.
* Multiagent systems for patient monitoring and diagnosis.
* Multiagent systems that improve medical training or education (for
example, tutoring systems).
* Medical agent-based decision support systems.
* Information agents that gather, compile, and organize medical
knowledge available on the Internet.
* Solutions to the basic methodological and technological problems
associated with deployment of agent-based healthcare systems:
 - Security and privacy of medical data.
 - Social acceptance of agent-based systems.
 - Lack of common medical ontologies.
 - Lack of centralized control.
 - Communication standards.
 - Integration with other types of software.
 - Legal and ethical issues.
* A survey of the state of the art in healthcare agents.

Important Dates
Submissions due for review: 9 June 2006
Notification of acceptance: 25 Aug. 2006
Final version submitted: 8 Sept. 2006
Issue publication: Nov./Dec. 06

Submission Guidelines

Authors who plan to submit a paper for this special issue are encouraged
to send a one-page text summary before 20 April to Antonio Moreno, the
special issue editor, at antonio.moreno@xxxxxxxx He will then provide
feedback regarding the paper's adequacy for the special issue.
Submissions should be 3,000 to 7,500 words (counting a standard figure
or table as 200 words) and should follow the magazine's style and
presentation guidelines (see www.computer.org/intelligent/author.htm).
References should be limited to 10 citations. To submit a manuscript,
access the IEEE Computer Society Web-based system, Manuscript Central,
at
http://cs-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/index.html.

Questions?
Contact Guest Editor Antonio Moreno, antonio.moreno@xxxxxxxx