Special issue: Advances in medical intelligent decision support systems

This special issue is concerned with Advances in Medical Decision Support Systems. Computer science contributions to the biomedical community started with the first expert systems. Since then advances have taken place in both the medical and biological domains and also in computer science technology. This means that additional automated support can be made available to these types of applications. These advances and their contribution to the biomedical community are the focus of this special issue. The application of Intelligent Decision Support Systems in medicine is the subject of considerable ongoing research, which concentrates on modelling some of the human actions or thinking processes, recognising diseases from a variety of input sources and even extends to the representation and querying of gene data from microarray databases. Five papers have been selected, after rigorous review, for this special issue. These cover two categories: the first set of papers focuses on the medical domain and mainly on classification of medical data for accurate diagnoses. The second set of papers focuses on biological data and more importantly retrieval queries from microarray data and relationships between gene products. Computational intelligent methodologies are used for the detection of breast cancer in the paper by Geraldo Braz Junior et al. Breast cancer is the major cause