Case-based reasoning in the health sciences: What's next?

SummaryObjectivesThis paper presents current work in case-based reasoning (CBR) in the health sciences, describes current trends and issues, and projects future directions for work in this field.Methods and materialIt represents the contributions of researchers at two workshops on case-based reasoning in the health sciences. These workshops were held at the Fifth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR-03) and the Seventh European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR-04).ResultsCurrent research in CBR in the health sciences is marked by its richness. Highlighted trends include work in bioinformatics, support to the elderly and people with disabilities, formalization of CBR in biomedicine, and feature and case mining.ConclusionCBR systems are being better designed to account for the complexity of biomedicine, to integrate into clinical settings and to communicate and interact with diverse systems and methods.