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A Multiagent Architecture for Developing Medical Information Retrieval Agents

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Abstract

Information that is available on the world wide web (WWW) is already more vast than can be comprehensibly studied by individuals and this quantity is increasing at a staggering pace. The quality of service delivered by physicians is dependent on the availability of current information. The agent paradigm offers a means for enabling physicians to filter information and retrieve only information that is relevant to current patient treatments. As with many specialized domains, agent-based information retrieval in medical domains must satisfy several domain-dependent constraints. A multiple agent architecture is developed and described in detail to efficiently provide agent-based information retrieval from the WWW and other explicit information resources. A simulation of the proposed multiple agent architecture shows a 97% decrease in information overload and an 85% increase in information relevancy over existing meta-search tools (with even larger gains over standard search engines).

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Walczak, S. A Multiagent Architecture for Developing Medical Information Retrieval Agents. Journal of Medical Systems 27, 479–498 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025668124244

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