Special Section on Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine

This special issue is devoted to the topic of Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine and to our dear friend Dirk Bartz, who suddenly passed away in March 2010. Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine is the title of a Eurographics workshop series that we started in Delft in 2008. Dirk Bartz, as a pioneer in the field, was selected as organizer for the second workshop to be held in July 2010 in Leipzig, where Dirk was a Professor of Computer-Assisted Surgery. Although deeply saddened by his passing away, we decided to organize the workshop in his memory (Alexander Wiebel from Max-Planck-Institute of Leipzig greatly supported the organization). One of Dirk’s last activities was to discuss with the Editor-in-Chief of this journal to provide a special issue on Visual Computing in Medicine, where the best workshop papers could be published in an extended and improved form. Dirk served as an associate editor of this journal for a long time and could convince the Editor-in-Chief that this was a good idea indeed. After Dirk passed away, we decided that we wanted to fulfill also this plan initiated by Dirk. The Editor-in-Chief J. Jorge agreed and offered to publish not only the three best VCBM conference papers but also other papers in that field. Thus, we are happy to present you a selection of seven papers on Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine. Based on the open call for contributions, twenty papers were submitted (among them the three invited papers, selected from the conference). Each of these papers was reviewed by at least three reviewers. As usual, a sufficient amount of newmaterial was required, and the papers had to fit within the theme of the special issue while still being accessible to the usual Computers and Graphics readership. Thus, some papers – despite valuable content – had to be rejected since they were too specific to a focused application problem. Based on these reviews seven papers could be accepted with minor revision. The reviewers provided many constructive comments to improve the papers, leading to substantially enhanced contributions. After another round of minor improvement, the papers were finally accepted. The accepted papers span the following themes: