Information technology in bio- and medical informatics

Biomedical engineering and medical informatics are challenging and rapidly growing areas. Applications of information technology in these areas are of paramount imp- tance. The aim of the first ITBAM conference was to bring together scientists, - searchers and practitioners from different disciplines (mathematics, bioinformatics, biology, medicine, biomedical engineering and computer science) having such c- mon interests. We hope that ITBAM conferences will provide opportunities for fru- ful discussions between all attendees and provide a platform where participants can exchange their most recent results, identify future directions and challenges, initiate possible collaborative research and system development, and develop common l- guages for solving problems in the realm of biomedical engineering, bioinformatics and medical informatics. The importance of computer-aided diagnosis and therapy has drawn more and more attention worldwide and laid the foundation for modern medicine with excellent potential for promising applications such as telemedicine, Web-based healthcare and analysis of genetic information. For this conference, after a peer-review process, we finally selected 13 long papers and 8 short papers that are now published in this volume. They are divided in to the following groups: workflow management and database; decision support and data management in biomedicine; medical data modelling and information retrieval; data mining in bioinformatics; knowledge representation and data management in bio- formatics; biological data and signal processing. The papers show how broad the spectrum of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engine- ing and medical informatics is.