The adolescence of AI in medicine: will the field come of age in the '90s?

Artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM) has reached a period of adolescence in which interactions with the outside world are not only natural but mandatory. Although the basic research topics in AIM may be those of artificial intelligence, the applied issues touch more generally on the broad field of medical informatics. To the extent that AIM research is driven by performance goals for biomedicine, AIM is simply one component within a wide range of research and development activities. Furthermore, an adequate appraisal of AIM research requires an understanding of the research motivations, the complexity of the problems, and a suitable definition of the criteria for judging the field's success. Effective fielding of AIM systems will be dependent on the development of integrated environments for communication and computing that allow merging of knowledge-based tools with other patient data-management and information-retrieval applications. The creation of this kind of infrastructure will require vision and resources from leaders who realize that the practice of medicine is inherently an information-management task and that biomedicine must make the same kind of coordinated commitment to computing technologies as have other segments of our society in which the importance of information management is well understood.