Selected papers from the 4th international conference on bioinspired systems and cognitive signal processing

This special issue is devoted to ‘‘Selected Papers from the 4th International Conference on Bioinspired Systems and Cognitive Signal Processing.” This peer-reviewed special issue is one product of the International Conference on Bioinspired systems and Signal Processing (Biosignals 2011), as part of the International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, Biostec (http://www.biosignals.biostec.org/BIOSIGNALS2011/home.asp), which was held in Rome, during 26–29 January 2011. This issue was promoted by the IEEE Technical Committee of Biomedical Signal Processing (IEE TC-BSP). The goal of this special issue is to convey mainly several messages which arose from this prestigious and intense conference. The major focus in this meeting was biomedical signal processing, where several areas of interest to the researchers in this field were comprehensively covered. This issue is therefore to report some highlighted contributions by a number of prominent researchers in the related field. Interested readers will find in this special issue papers that belong broadly to the areas of neuroscience, cardiovascular signals, behaviour, body movement, and modelling. These areas have been spanned by a number of articles in computational modelling and intelligence, neuroimaging, neuromarketing, body movement and gait analysis, brain-computer interfacing, electrocardiography and analysis of cardiovascular signals, neurocomputing and retinal image matching technique. What follows is a brief editorial review of the topics covered by the published papers in this special issue.