An official special session at

IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI)
International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

Padova, Italy · 18-23 July, 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and medicine has been continuously growing in recent years due to the capabilities of novel machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches, the accessibility to sensor- and vision-based data, the improvements in the computational resources, among many others. Moreover, from the emerging convergence of big data and AI, we are entering the new era of Computational Health that is focused, through personalized medicine, on analyzing, designing, implementing, and evaluating information and communication systems to improve patient care.

Specifically, AI approaches help to improve timing diagnostic decisions, foster the discovery of new therapeutics tools, and support effective treatments for present and future diseases. Researchers coupled with expert clinicians play a major role in turning complex medical data (e.g., medical images, clinical data, sensor data, etc.) into actionable knowledge that ultimately improves patient care. In the last years, these topics have drawn clinical and ML research leading to practical and successful applications in healthcare.

Nevertheless, the implementation of AI in healthcare and medicine has raised security and ethical challenges like transparency, awareness, fairness, privacy, data biasing, accountability, and others. These challenges hamper the adoption of AI in the field because stakeholders do not trust the systems, and fear that they might have unintended harmful effects. Unless different approaches are proposed to tackle the above issues, the potential of these transforming technologies will not produce successful and reliable applications.

Thus, this special session aims to present recent advances in AI techniques and new approaches for addressing key challenges and issues for delivering reliable and trustworthy intelligent systems in healthcare and medicine, with special emphasis on related ML- and DL-based AI systems.

List of Topics

Contributions are expected to be related, but not limited, to the following topics:

• Computational intelligence in clinical medical science;

• AI-based medical decision making;

• Natural language processing in medical science;

• Models and systems for AI-based medical solutions;

• Intelligent and process-aware information systems in healthcare and medical science;

• Data analytics and mining for biomedical decision support;

• Genomic and proteomic data analysis;

• Intelligent heterogeneous data sources integration for data-intensive clinical tasks;

• Gait analysis;

• Therapy selection;

• (Explainable) AI-based modeling and management of healthcare data and clinical processes;

• Biomedical image analysis;

• Explainable data analytics for healthcare;

• New computational platforms and models for biomedicine;

• Automatic disease prediction;

• Automatic diagnosis support system;

• AI and data science in medical science;

• AI for personalized medical science;

• ML as a tool to support medical diagnoses and decisions;

• DL networks for detection systems;

• Exploring advanced neural networks (i.e. deep neural networks) in healthcare

• Generative adversarial networks (GANs) for health data (neuro-images, EEG, ECG, …);

• Ensembles architectures to improve classification, detection, and prediction performances for medical data;

• Novel neural-based approaches to process big clinical data;

• Real-time neural networks for patients monitoring;

• Unsupervised learning approaches for unlabeled data;

• ML and DL for electrophysiological data (ECG, EMG, EEG, etc.)

Audience

This special session is intended for students, scientists, professionals, and practitioners in the field of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches in medicine and healthcare. The special session has an emphasis on the theoretical and practical implementations and implications of the ML and DL approaches, specifically on addressing key challenges and issues for delivering reliable and trustworthy intelligent systems in healthcare and medicine. Hence a broad range of stakeholders are invited to participate, including academia, healthcare professionals, researchers, pharmaceutical industry, the EU-Innovation Network, and related entities.

Educational, technical, industrial, and practical communities on trustworthy AI, explainable AI, ethical-by-design, AI in medicine, and AI in healthcare are welcome.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions have to be adhered to the general author guidelines provided by WCCI here.

Once you are in the submission system, select the Special Session (IJCNN-SS-39 Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Medicine: Challenges and Breakthroughs) as the main topic of your paper.

This year, the review process will be double-blind, i.e. reviewers will not know the authors' identity (and vice versa). Authors should ensure their anonymity in the submitted papers.

The accepted papers will be included in the proceedings of the IJCNN 2022 and indexed in IEEEXplore.

Important Dates

• [NEW] Title and abstract submission: January 31, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE) After this date, authors will not be able to create new submissions

• [NEW] Paper submission: February 14, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE) STRICT DEADLINE

• Notification of acceptance: April 26, 2022

• Final paper submission: May 23, 2022

• Special session @ WCCI: July 18-23, 2022

Special Session Organizers

Hiram Ponce (chair), Universidad Panamericana, Mexico
Lerina Aversano, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
Mario Luca Bernardi, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
Rui Chen, Samsung, United States of America
Lourdes Martínez-Villaseñor, Universidad Panamericana, Mexico
Kai Qin, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Contact

Any inquiries or doubts, please refer to Hiram Ponce <hponce@up.edu.mx>.

This special session is co-located at the WCCI/IJCNN 2022. More information can be found in the official website of the conference: https://wcci2022.org/