all for papers Methods of Information in Medicine Special Issue on Applications of Intelligent Data Analysis in Medicine http://aim.unipv.it/~ric/aidam Guest editors: Riccardo Bellazzi and Blaz Zupan BACKGROUND In all human activities, automatic data collection pushes towards the development of tools able to handle and analyze data in a computer-supported fashion. In the majority of the application areas, this task cannot be accomplished without using the additionally available knowledge on the domain. This need becomes essential in biomedical applications, since medical decision making needs to be supported by arguments based on basic medical and pharmacological knowledge. Intelligent data analysis methods support information extraction from data by potentially exploiting domain knowledge. Most common techniques include machine learning, temporal data abstraction, visualization, Bayesian analysis and data mining. To increase the chances of utilizing these methods within clinical practice, the intelligent data analysis process typically gains from interaction by medical experts in all its phases starting from data gathering and cleaning to evaluation and exploitation of results. OBJECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE This special issue will address applications of intelligent data analysis (IDA) in medicine. The objective of the special issue is to collect papers that show development, adaptation or re-use of existing IDA methods to cope with a specific medical problem. The ultimate goal of the issue is to increase the awareness and acceptance of IDA methods in medical community through papers that show their successful application. The topics relevant to this special issue include but are not limited to: * Applications of IDA methods in a particular medical domain with emphases on results obtained and their (potential) impact on the medical practice. * Inclusion of additional domain knowledge (background knowledge) in the data analysis process. * Inclusion of medical experts/physicians in the preparation of data for IDA process (e.g., data representation, modeling, cleaning, selection, and transformation), as well as in the interpretation and exploitation of results. * Representation of extracted knowledge. * Visualization of medical data and visualization of results of IDA. * Treatment of time: applications of IDA in patient monitoring or bio-signal processing. * Integration of IDA tools into the existing medical information systems. * Prospects of applying IDA techniques in medicine. Lessons on how to increase the acceptance of these tools by physicians and medical experts. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES High quality, original papers that deal with real-world problems are solicited. All the manuscripts submitted will be subject to a rigorous review process. Submissions of full papers should be limited to at most 4,000 words, which amounts to about 12-16 pages of 250 words each, including figures, tables, and references. The papers should follow the submission guidelines of Methods of Information in Medicine. Papers must not have appeared in, nor be under consideration by other journals. Send 4 (four) copies of each submission to the guest editors listed below (use the address of Riccardo Bellazzi). Additionally e-mail the title page (authors, affiliations, abstract, keywords) to ric@aim.unipv.it. Please note that the final manuscripts of accepted papers should preferably be no longer than 4 printed pages of Methods of Information in Medicine, as for each printed page above the number of four (if required) "Methods" is charging authors with US$ 65. For additional submission and final manuscript preparation guidelines please refer to Methods of Information in Medicine or check Special issue's web page at http://aim.unipv.it/~ric/aidam. IMPORTANT DATES October 15, 1999 Full papers received by guest editors January 15, 2000 Notification of acceptance April 15, 2000 Final manuscript received Fall/Winter 2000 Publication of the special issue GUEST EDITORS Riccardo Bellazzi Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universita di Pavia Via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy e-mail: ric@aim.unipv.it Blaz Zupan Faculty of Computer Science University of Ljubljana Trzaska 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia e-mail: blaz.zupan@fri.uni-lj.si -- ================================================== Riccardo Bellazzi, PhD Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universita' di Pavia, via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy tel: 39-0382-505-511, fax:39-0382-505-373 e-mail: ric@aim.unipv.it ===================================================