The Second European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine followed the successful meeting in Marseilles in 1987. As for AIME 87, the goal of AIME 89 was to promote scientific interchange within and between all subfields of AI in medicine, among researchers from all over the world, and especially from Europe. There were sessions on: knowledge elicidation and acquisition, architectures for medical knowledge-based systems, clinical applications, methodology, reasoning based on physiological models, and uncertainty. It is clear form the quality of papers presented, that the rate of development which took place between the Pavia meeting of 1985 and AIME 87 has been well maintained. With the launch of the European Community's exploratory programme in Advanced Informatics in Medicine in Europe, 1989 is clearly a very important year for this discipline. AIME 89 provided an important forum which demonstrated progress in some of the more difficult methodological problems, and advances in the application of these techniques to real-world medicine. This volume should be consulted by anyone who wishes to appreciate the state of the art in Medical AI in Europe.
