Preface to Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6266

Biomedical engineering and medical informatics are challenging and rapidly growing areas. Applications of information technology in these areas are of paramount importance. The aim of the first ITBAM conference was to bring together scientists, researchers and practitioners from different disciplines (mathematics, bioinformatics, biology, medicine, biomedical engineering and computer science) having such common interests. We hope that ITBAM conferences will provide opportunities for fruitful 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 languages 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 bioinformatics; biological data and signal processing. The papers show how broad the spectrum of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engineering and medical informatics is. The editors would like to thank all the participants for their high-quality contributions and Springer for publishing the proceedings of this conference. Our special thanks go to Gabriela Wagner for her hard work on various aspects of this event.