The European Society for Arti?cial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) was - tablished in 1986 with two main goals: 1) to foster fundamental and applied research in the application of Arti?cial Intelligence (AI) techniques to medical care and medical research, and 2) to provide a forum for reporting signi?cant results achieved at biennial conferences. Additionally, AIME assists medical - dustrials to identify new AI techniques with high potential for integration into new products. A major activity of this society has been a series of international conferences,fromMarseille(FR)in1987toCascais(PT)in2001,heldbiennially over the last 16 years. The AIME conference provides a unique opportunity to present and improve the international state of the art of AI in medicine from both a research and an applicationsperspective.Forthispurpose,theAIMEconferenceincludesinvited lectures, contributed papers, system demonstrations, tutorials and workshops. The present volume contains the proceedings of the AIME 2003 conference, the ninthconferenceonArti?cialIntelligenceinMedicineinEurope,heldinCyprus, October 18-22, 2003.
In the AIME 2003 conference announcement, we encouraged authors to s- mit original contributions to the development of theory, techniques, and - plications of AI in medicine, including the evaluation of health care programs. Theoretical papers should include a prospective part about possible applications to medical problems solving. Technical papers should describe the novelty of the proposed approach, its assumptions and pros and cons compared to other alt- native techniques. Application papers should present su?cient information to allow the evaluation of the practical bene?ts of the proposed system or meth- ology.