Behavior Trees as a Representation for Medical Procedures

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of behavior trees, a graphical modeling language from gaming, for representing and constructing medical procedures, emphasizing their readability and composability.

Contribution

It demonstrates how behavior trees can be effectively constructed for medical procedures, highlighting their advantages over traditional methods.

Findings

Behavior trees are suitable for modeling medical procedures.

BTs improve readability and modularity in procedure representation.

The paper provides examples of BT construction for medical tasks.

Abstract

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. This paper will illustrate construction of BTs for exemplary medical procedures. We are pleased to acknowledge support from National Science Foundation grant #IIS-1637444 and collaborations on that project with Johns Hopkins University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.