Emerging medical informatics with case-based reasoning for aiding clinical decision in multi-agent system

•Combined operation of MAS, CBR and ontologies can aide clinical decision-making.•MAS and its agent types define rules and interfaces for knowledge representation.•MAS ensures the cooperation between heterogeneous medical knowledge bases.•CBR restores experience to solve similar issues and to improve knowledge retrieval.•Ontology interprets user requests for question answering between MAS and user.