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Playing an active role in the 12th World Congress on Medical Informatics has been an honour and a privilege for the Editorial Committee. We closely cooperated with our colleagues and friends of the Scientific Program Committee (SPC) and the Organizing Committee (OC). Out of 638 submissions, 292 high quality papers were selected for publication in these proceedings by the SPC. Out of 218 poster submissions, 21 posters were nominated for a best poster award; they are included as 1 page contributions in these proceedings. While high quality contributions have been selected by the SPC, the Editorial Committee has focussed on providing proceedings with a high quality of format and presentation which made additional editing necessary. The proceedings are also appearing on CD-ROM. All accepted poster contributions are published on an additional CD-ROM. The MEDINFO 2007 Proceedings present an excellent overview of a dynamic and quickly growing field, demonstrating methodical and practical progress from around the world. Information science and, specifically, (Bio-) Medical Informatics have become core pillars of foundational and clinical research, of medical care, and of prevention. MEDINFO 2007 in Brisbane will be the leading conference of the year, bringing a worldwide community together. We have organized the proceedings into twelve chapters, covering topics such as eHealth, Decision Support, Improving Quality, Usability, Sustainability, Genomics, Biomedical Image and Signal Processing, and Education and Training. Within each chapter, the articles are organized according to the conference sessions; the session titles are shown in the table of contents. The assistance of HISA has been invaluable in all editorial steps, including communication with authors, language editing, and formatting of manuscripts. We owe specific thanks to Joan Edgecumbe, Dale Proposch and Tom Morgan. The Editorial Committee Klaus A. Kuhn, Germany; James R. Warren, New Zealand; Tze Yun Leong, Singapore [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical informatics as a discipline is not very old, yet in the fifty years of its existence some shifts in interest have occurred. The development and evaluation of information systems has been there from the beginning. This topic was driven by technology changes (new database approaches, progress in electronic communication and standardization issues, etc.). In the first decades research was also devoted to investigating basic medical and biological processes. The analysis of signals, for example EKGs, EEGs and signals from chemical analyzers images was an important research area. Emphasis was initially on data analysis techniques but gradually shifted to interpretation of the processed data by means of statistical and pattern recognition methods. This trend continued and gradually the emphasis shifted from the provision of information to the provision of knowledge. At present computers are ubiquitous. New technologies make computers almost invisible. Nanotechnology provides important extensions to our armamentarium. Computing based on DNA and enzymes is currently investigated in several research centers. Such computers can help us for example to determine certain pathological cells in tissues and when detected the “computers” release a drug to kill these cells. Ubiquitous computing will support our aging societies. People can stay longer at home with the help of computers that monitor them. Some of the problems that we have to solve – apart from technical ones – in our opinion are reminiscent of the problems we had to solve in the beginning of medical informatics. But now we have the advantage of hindsight. About three hundred manuscripts were submitted and finally 143 of them were accepted. We thank all the reviewers for their work. Without them it would have been impossible to obtain a program with a quality as the one that is presented in this Proceedings. We are also very much indebted to NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) that provided grants for inviting two keynote speakers. We are sure that the program contains interesting information for a broad audience. We wish you a happy stay in Maastricht and much pleasure in reading articles from this Proceedings. Arie Hasman, Reinhold Haux, Johan van der Lei, Etienne De Clercq, Francis H. Roger France [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]