A multiagent architecture for developing medical information retrieval agents

J Med Syst. 2003 Oct;27(5):479-98. doi: 10.1023/a:1025668124244.

Abstract

Information that is available on the world wide web (WWW) is already more vast than can be comprehensibly studied by individuals and this quantity is increasing at a staggering pace. The quality of service delivered by physicians is dependent on the availability of current information. The agent paradigm offers a means for enabling physicians to filter information and retrieve only information that is relevant to current patient treatments. As with many specialized domains, agent-based information retrieval in medical domains must satisfy several domain-dependent constraints. A multiple agent architecture is developed and described in detail to efficiently provide agent-based information retrieval from the WWW and other explicit information resources. A simulation of the proposed multiple agent architecture shows a 97% decrease in information overload and an 85% increase in information relevancy over existing meta-search tools (with even larger gains over standard search engines).

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Systems / standards*
  • Databases, Bibliographic / standards
  • Evidence-Based Medicine
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / standards*
  • Internet / standards*
  • Medical Informatics / standards*
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Terminology as Topic
  • User-Computer Interface