A multiagent architecture for developing medical information retrieval agents.

Information that is available on the world wide web (WWW) is already more vast than can be comprehensibly studied by individuals and this quantity is increasing at a staggering pace. The quality of service delivered by physicians is dependent on the availability of current information. The agent paradigm offers a means for enabling physicians to filter information and retrieve only information that is relevant to current patient treatments. As with many specialized domains, agent-based information retrieval in medical domains must satisfy several domain-dependent constraints. A multiple agent architecture is developed and described in detail to efficiently provide agent-based information retrieval from the WWW and other explicit information resources. A simulation of the proposed multiple agent architecture shows a 97% decrease in information overload and an 85% increase in information relevancy over existing meta-search tools (with even larger gains over standard search engines).