The coming of age of artificial intelligence in medicine

This paper is based on a panel discussion held at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe (AIME) conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in July 2007. It had been more than 15 years since Edward Shortliffe gave a talk at AIME in which he characterized artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine as being in its "adolescence" (Shortliffe EH. The adolescence of AI in medicine: will the field come of age in the '90s? Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 1993;5:93-106). In this article, the discussants reflect on medical AI research during the subsequent years and characterize the maturity and influence that has been achieved to date. Participants focus on their personal areas of expertise, ranging from clinical decision-making, reasoning under uncertainty, and knowledge representation to systems integration, translational bioinformatics, and cognitive issues in both the modeling of expertise and the creation of acceptable systems.