Guest Editorial: First IEEE Symposium on Biomedical Imaging

Guest Editorial Technological advances in biomedical imaging are providing unprecedented opportunities for improving our understanding of biological processes and revealing the anatomical and functional organization of biological systems, from macro- to nano-scales. Research in this area is progressing at an extraordinary rate and is becoming more and more interdisciplinary. The IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) was initiated to bring together researchers from the medical and biological imaging communities and to provide an effective forum for multidisciplinary interactions. The first meeting was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Washington, DC, July 7-10, 2002. It was organized jointly by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and co-sponsored by National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of the Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), representing the first IEEE-NIH collaborative effort on a major imaging conference. The symposium was focused on the engineering aspects of biomedical imaging while promoting an integrative approach through all scales of observation. It successfully brought together a large group of biomedical imaging researchers and practitioners (535 participants) with different backgrounds to share their knowledge and to address the latest challenges in data acquisition, image reconstruction, image processing, analysis, and visualization. A highlight of the symposium was the inspired opening address by Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the newly appointed director of the NIH. He stressed the importance of imaging for the biomedical sciences and expressed a strong interest in the conference. Dr. Zerhouni is very much in favor of collaborations between engineers and biomedical scientists, having experienced them first hand as a radiologist. He holds several patents related to imaging and is widely known for having introduced magnetic resonance tagging as a diagnostic tool for assessing heart function. Another noted NIH speaker was Dr. Roderic Pettigrew, who will become NIBIB's first permanent director in September 2002. He opened the first session by expressing his strong support for ISBI; he also explained the mission of NIBIB in which imaging will play a major role. The scientific program of the conference consisted of 3 plenary talks, 10 special sessions, 19 oral sessions, and 6 poster sessions over three days. The plenary talks, one on each day, covered topics from molecular imaging (by Michael Phelps, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Medicine), functional imaging (by Alan Koretsky, NIH), to medical image analysis (by Michael Brady, University of Oxford, U.K.). The first two talks reviewed and discussed the latest developments in imaging modalities and applications, while the latter illustrated the power and potential of image processing and analysis algorithms. The special sessions, consisting of invited paper