Introduction to Computational Intelligence in Healthcare

This chapter presents introductory remarks on computational intelligence in healthcare practice, and it provides a brief outline for each of the succeeding chapters in the remainder of this book. 1.1 Computational Intelligence and Healthcare Practice Computational intelligence provides considerable promise for advancing many aspects of healthcare practice, including clinical disease management such as prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up, as well as administrative management of patients such as patient information and healthcare delivery to patients. Computational intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents. An intelligent agent is a system that acts intelligently—it does what it thinks appropriate for its circumstances and its goal, it is flexible to changing environments and changing goals, it learns from experience, and it makes appropriate choices given perceptual limitations and finite computation. However, computational intelligence is more than just the study of the design of intelligent agents, in particular, in application domains. It also includes the study of problems for which there are no effective algorithms, either because it is not possible to formulate them or because they are NPhard and thus not effective in real life applications. Human being (or biological organisms) can solve such problems every day with various degrees of competence: extracting meaning from perception, understanding language, and solving ill-defined computer vision problems. Thus, the central scientific goal of computational intelligence is to understand the principles that make intelligent behavior possible, whether in natural or in artificial systems. The central engineering goal of computational intelligence is to specify methods for the design of useful, intelligent artifacts. Indeed, the core methods of computational intelligence—neural computing, fuzzy systems, and evolutionary computing—have recently emerged as promising tools for H. Yoshida et al.: Introduction to Computational Intelligence in Healthcare, Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) 65, 1–4 (2007) www.springerlink.com c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007