It is the mission of the Artificial Intelligence Group of the Department of Informatics of the School of Engineering of The University of Minho to provide the People of Minho  with a Medical Informatics  Center for education, research, and service activities.

By providing predoctoral, postdoctoral and the students in the School of Engineering with a learning environment in which to develop the technical competence, intellectual capacity and professional responsibility for meeting the health needs of the People of Minho as part of the total Health Care System.

By providing the environment for active research programs in the behavioural, biological, clinical and educational aspects of Medical Informatics.

By promoting and contributing to the continuing professional development of all members of the Medical Informatics Team by making continuing education readily available and applicable to the most current practices of Medical Informatics at any given time.

We aim to become a leading international research center with multidisciplinary interests, training outstanding graduate and postdoctoral researchers. We collaborate with other Departments, Schools and Research Centers with active research programs in Science and Engineering, and encourage research and training links with other centers outside The University of Minho.

Modern therapies deal with increasingly complex technical equipment and require a deep understanding of biophysical processes in order to design effective treatments. A detailed and precise prediction of the effects of changing therapy parameters is often far beyond the skills even of experienced physicians. Mathematical models help to understand, predict, and design such treatments. We are concerned with research and development in the area of Scientific Medical Treatment and Symbolic Modeling based on Mathematical Logic for such mathematical treatment models. The tasks we intend to address comprise:

• Modeling - to translate medical problems into the language of mathematics;
• Simulation - to gain insight into processes and to predict effects of therapies;
• Identification -  to obtain model parameters from noisy measurements;
• optimization - for individual diagnostic and treatment planning; and
• education - to guarantee that all health professionals be capable of working together with our patients and citizens to understand and meet their health care needs.