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