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Vol: 48(62) No: 2 / June 2003 Development of the Software Support for Organ Transplant Management C. Muntean Department of Medical Informatics, University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Victor Babes”, Timsoara, Romania, phone: (40)256-190288, e-mail: cmuntean@medinfo.umft.ro, web: http://www.medinfo.umft.ro A. Kigyosi Department of Medical Informatics, University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Victor Babes”, Timsoara, Romania M. Focsa Department of Medical Informatics, University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Victor Babes”, Timsoara, Romania Keywords: organ procurement, information management, decision support management. Abstract During the last few years, there has been a significant improvement in the area of organ transplant. In particular, transplants are no longer the last-option kind of therapies, and recent important success is contributing to increase the number of organ transplants in Romania. However, despite significant improvements in the surgery process itself, the coordination of the preliminary activities involved in an organ transplant operation is still a very challenging, complex, and not yet well understood process. Within this context, the authors tried to define a multi-agent system that would support transplant coordinators, doctors and nurses in performing the various activities that precede the surgery operation itself. This complex process is called Organ Transplant Management (OTM). The main goal is to understand how the different OTM tasks are interrelated, in order to build an innovative software system that aims to support medical practitioners involved in the various decision-making steps. The current work and the extensive discussions with experts in this area provided ground for the definition of the OTM system. We argue that this tool, when integrated in real Hospitals and transplant centers, will facilitate many of the tasks currently performed by humans, and will allow optimization of precious resources such as time and personnel. References [1] M. Becker, C. Heine, R. Herrler, and K.-H. Krempels. OntHos an Ontology for Hospital Scenarios Technical Report 300. Julius-Maximilians-Universitat Wiirzburg, Institut flir Informatik, September 2002 [2] M. Calisti. Abstracting Communication in Distributed Agent-Based Systems. Concrete Communication Abstractions ofthe next Distributed Object Systems Workshop Proceedings. ECOOP2002, June 2002 [3] U. Cortes, A. Lopez-Navidad, J. Vazquez-SaJceda,. D. Busquets, M. Nicolas, S. Lopez, A. Vazquez, F. Vazquez i F. Caballero. UCTx: A Multi-Agent approach to model a Transplant Coordination Unit In Proceedings ofthe]\"d Congn?s Catald d\'Intelligencia Artificial. CCIA 2000, October 2000. [4] M. Costanzo. Selection and treatment of candidates for heart transplantation. Seminar OIl Thorax Cardiovascular Surgery. Available:http://www.americanheartorg/presenter.ihtml?identifier,1298, 1995. [5] L. Fritsche, K. Schroter, G. Lindemann, H.H Neumayer: A Web-based Electronic Patient Record System as a means for Collection of Clinical Data. In Proceedings ofthe ISMDA 2000, LNCS Vol. 1933, Springer Verlag, 2000. [6] S. Goddard, DH. Adams. New approaches to immunosuppression in liver transplantation. J Gastroenterol Hepatol. 17(2):116-26, February 2001.Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2002. [7] N. Jennings, Building Complex Software Systems, Communication ofthe A CM, 44 (4) 35-41, June 2001. [8] D.B. Leake and R. Sooriamurthi. Advances in Case-Based Reasoning. ECCBR 2002 Proceedings. [9] U. Thalheimer, and F. Capra. Liver transplantation: making the best out of what we have. Digital Distributed Science.47(5):945-53, May 2002. [10] M. Wallace. Practical applications of constraint programming. Constraints Journal, 1:139-168, 1996 [11] Software Support for Organ Transplant Management Monique Calisti, Petra Funk, Patrick Brunschwig Whitestein Technologies AG, Gotthardstrasse 50, CH-8002 Zurich, Switzerland, [12] Weiss, G. (Ed.) \"Multiagent Systems. A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence\". MIT Press, 1999. [13] Bellifemine, F., Poggi, A., Rimassa, G., \"Developing multi-agent systems with a FIPA compliant agent framework\", Software Practice and Experience, no.31, pp. 103-128, 2001. [14] FIPA: Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (http://www.fipa.org). |