Thirty years of artificial intelligence in medicine (AIME) conferences: A review of research themes

•Fifteen Artificial Intelligence in MEdicine (AIME) conferences have been organized over the last 30 years.•We review the main research themes and investigate their scientific impact.•Knowledge engeering for medical expert systems dominated the first decade of AIME, while machine learning and data mining prevailed thereafter.•The work on guidelines and protocols has been highly cited, followed by temporal information management and machine learning/data mining.•Promising directions for future research are Big Data, personalized medicine, Evidence Based Medicine, business process modeling, process mining and NLP in social media.

BackgroundOver the past 30 years, the international conference on Artificial Intelligence in MEdicine (AIME) has been organized at different venues across Europe every 2 years, establishing a forum for scientific exchange and creating an active research community. The Artificial Intelligence in Medicine journal has published theme issues with extended versions of selected AIME papers since 1998.ObjectivesTo review the history of AIME conferences, investigate its impact on the wider research field, and identify challenges for its future.MethodsWe analyzed a total of 122 session titles to create a taxonomy of research themes and topics. We classified all 734 AIME conference papers published between 1985 and 2013 with this taxonomy. We also analyzed the citations to these conference papers and to 55 special issue papers.ResultsWe identified 30 research topics across 12 themes. AIME was dominated by knowledge engineering research in its first decade, while machine learning and data mining prevailed thereafter. Together these two themes have contributed about 51% of all papers. There have been eight AIME papers that were cited at least 10 times per year since their publication.ConclusionsThere has been a major shift from knowledge-based to data-driven methods while the interest for other research themes such as uncertainty management, image and signal processing, and natural language processing has been stable since the early 1990s. AIME papers relating to guidelines and protocols are among the most highly cited.