Toward Next Generation Integrative Semantic Health Information Assistants

Abstract

Managing a complex illness often requires different treatment regimens spread over a long time. The complexity of these potentially life-threatening diagnoses can be daunting to patients while they are most vulnerable. We present a vision for artificial intelligence-enabled tools for assisting patients in managing the complex information given to them over the course of their treatments through the combination of existing and emerging techniques from natural language processing and knowledge representation. We provide examples from an actual breast cancer diagnosis and treatment plan and highlight the development of new combinations of techniques to build tools that can reason about data from a variety of sources and act as intelligence-augmenting agents. We conclude with a discussion of some additional challenges facing artificial intelligence practitioners as applications become patient-centric.