Special issue on innovations in medicine and healthcare

This special issue contains research articles including ones based on some of the best papers presented at the InMed 2014 conference held in July 2014 in San Sebastian, Spain, as well as some contributions from the open call for papers. The aim of the Special Issue is to provide a snapshot of current hot topics and approaches in this very active domain. The new wave of innovation comes through the introduction of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) both in the daily relation of patients and physicians and in the way that people take control of their personal health by making use of assistive technologies. Also, ICT has an increasing presence in the analytical processes carried out in order to obtain diagnostic information, or to aid in the diagnostic decision. There is a growing body of work on medical decision support systems (aka clinical decision support systems), as well as on intelligent analysis of medical imaging and physiological signal data.  In this regard, many of the papers in this issue are directly related to recent developments of ICT in medicine and healthcare. One very interesting phenomena in the ICT and machine learning fields is the availability of free code solutions, which are boosting research effort and facilitating comparisons between methods, as well as providing some kind of standardisation of the analysis and results. The Special Issue also contains examples of more classical bioengineering problems related to the design of specific devices and their calibration.