Behavior Trees as a Representation for Medical Procedures

Understand

Objective: Effective collaboration between machines and clinicians requires flexible data structures to represent medical processes and clinical practice guidelines.

• Such a data structure could enable effective turn-taking between human and automated components of a complex treatment, accurate on-line monitoring of clinical treatments (for example to detect medical errors), or automated treatment systems (such as future medical robots) whose overall treatment plan is understandable and auditable by human experts.
• Materials and Methods: Behavior trees (BTs) emerged from video game development as a graphical language for modeling intelligent agent behavior.
• BTs have several properties which are attractive for modeling medical procedures including human-readability, authoring tools, and composability.