Research

Research at ATIA

One of the the main goals of the institute is to integrate knowledge from different health research disciplines by using and developing AI systems, and making them available to healthcare professionals. This can be achieved by structuring results from scientific literature as well as observations and measurements from individual patients in AI systems that can reason with this information.

In particular, knowledge from sources as heterogeneous as medicine, biology, psychology and psychiatry may each be represented by their own agents  and agents may each have their own method of reasoning. Based on information available about a patient and the agents' own instruction sets, agents can reason on chains of causes and effects. In other words: our knowledge based systems structure knowledge and can reason with this knowledge in such a way that we can make more refined diagnoses and can predict prevention and treatment for individual patients based on their unique constellation. 

Individual disease treatment
We reiterate that the Alan Turing Institute Almere aims at an interdisciplinary approach to health-related research, particularly targeted at individualized disease treatment. Although there is a growing interest for the individual patient in healthcare and health science in general, our approach is unique in that it employs techniques from artificial intelligence, and agent technology in particular, to reach its goals.

In order to achieve this, we need to strive for a fruitful cooperation between AI researchers and (medical) domain experts. The expertise of the institute's staff is therefore truly multidisciplinary. We also collaborate with external parties with various expertises in the medical domain. The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand we need external parties with expertise and data on interesting domains in order to experiment with our approach and show its validity, while on the other an external party will gain from the results that we will obtain with our method in order to advance the state of the art in its domain. An academic partner will, moreover, benefit from courses that we may provide on our expertise(s) for its master and PhD programs. 

Future:
We aim for the further development of our multidisciplinary research method through collaboration with external parties working in the medical domain, in cooperation with a Dutch university to safeguard and corroborate the institute's academic status and ambition.

Links to our research projects:

• Artificial Intelligence

Current Healthcare Knowledge Domains:

• Obesity
• Femal Sexual Dysfunction
• Coginitive Reserve