This editorial first presents the papers of the special issue and the context of the conference they were selected from. Then, a further outlook is given into the broad range of topics in medical imaging and the future developments that we regard as important.
This special issue of the International Journal of Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics highlights the best papers presented at the First International Conference on Medical Imaging and Telemedicine (MIT) 2005. MIT took place in Wuyi Shan in the Fujian province of China in August 2005. MIT is financed and organized in part by the TIME 1 project (Tele-Imaging in MEdicine) to create a bridge between China and Europe on collaborative health care and particularly in the imaging field. The TIME project is organized by the European Union Asia ICT Program and includes several Universities in Europe and Asia.
Although MIT 2005 was the first conference in this series a large variety of submissions was obtained. In total, over 60 papers were submitted to the conference organizers and 45 were chosen for presentation after peer-review, among them 36 for oral presentation and 9 posters. Subjects varied from Telemedicine to image management, classical image analysis and processing towards simulation, and also on new image capturing devices.
The guest editors of this special issue had the difficult decision to select papers presented at the conference. Criteria for selection were not only the content of the paper and the quality of the oral presentation at the conference itself but also the scientific potential. Goal was to give also younger researchers the possibility to present their work to a larger audience. In a first step, 13 authors were chosen who submitted an extended version of their papers to the guest editors who reviewed the papers giving comments on necessary improvements. Then, a peer review process with three reviewers per paper was started that reduced the list of 13 potential papers to the best 10. The papers represent well the extreme variety of topics that were present at the conference highlighting the variety of the medical imaging field itself: