Medical Cybernetics covers an emerging working program for the application of systems- and communications-theory, connectionism and decision theory on biomedical research and health related questions.

(Taken, with permission, from [Dietrich 1999-2004])

Major fields

Medical Systems Theory

The scope of medical systems theory is searching for and modelling of physiological dynamics in the intact and diseased organism to gain deeper insights into the organizational principles of life and its perturbations.

Medical Information and Communication Theory

Motivated by the awareness of information as an essential principle of life the application of communication theory to biomedicine aims to describe signalling processes in different physiological layers mathematically.

Connectionism

Connectionistic models describe information processing in neural networks - thus forming a bridge between biological and technological research.

Medical Decision Theory

The Goal of MDT is to gather evidence based foundations for decision making in the clinical setting.

Scientists

• W. Ross Asbhy
• Claude Bernard
• Valentin Braitenberg
• Walter Cannon
• Joseph J. DiStefano III
• Stephen Grossberg
• Hiroaki Kitano
• Aldo Masturzo
• Humberto Maturana
• Warren McCulloch
• Horst Mittelstaedt
• Walter Pitts
• Arturo Rosenblueth
• Harold C. Sox
• Felix Tretter
• Robert Trappl
• Francisco Varela
• Frederic Vester
• Paul Watzlawick

References

Dietrich, J. W. (1999-2004). Medical Cybernetics - A Definition. Medizinische Kybernetik | Medical Cybernetics. http://www.medizinische-kybernetik.de/definition.html (13 Jun. 2004).

External links

• Institute for Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Medical University Vienna, Austria
• Medical Cybernetics in the Open Encyclopedia Project
• Portal Server Medizinische Kybernetik | Medical Cybernetics
• UCLA Biocybernetics Laboratory, Los Angeles, Ca, USA

See also: biological cybernetics, complex systems, cybernetics, systems theory