Over the past several years, Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) has become a premier international conference, featuring presentations on the multidisciplinary fields of medical image computing, computer-assisted intervention, and medical robotics. The conference brings together clinicians, biological scientists, computer scientists, engineers, physicists and other researchers, and offers them a forum to exchange ideas in these exciting and rapidly growing fields.
The seventh MICCAI conference was held from 26 to 29 September 2004 in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France – the first French venue since the conference was established in 1998. One objective of the 2004 meeting was to encourage contributions strengthening the links between innovative biomedical science and engineering research and clinical applications, with a special emphasis on validation issues.
The impact of MICCAI increases each year and the quality and quantity of submitted papers was very high. The 2004 conference attracted an overall attendance of 607 participants from more than 30 countries. The program committee received 516 full-length submissions and 101 short communications from 36 countries and 6 continents. All submissions were reviewed by up to four external reviewers from the Scientific Review Committee and a primary reviewer from the Program Committee. All reviews were then considered by the MICCAI 2004 Program Committee, resulting in the acceptance of 235 full papers and 33 short communications. The normal mode of presentation at MICCAI 2004 was as a poster; in addition, 46 papers were chosen for oral presentation.
Of all the papers presented, a small number were selected for possible inclusion in this special issue of Computer Assisted Surgery. The selection was based on the suitability of the subject matter, original comments, receipt of MICCAI awards, and scores in the conference peer-review process, along with the quality of the presentations and posters during the meeting itself. The authors were asked to expand their articles from the conference proceedings in order to reach the level of an archived journal publication in quality and detail. In the end, six of the invited papers successfully completed the journal's review process and are included in this issue, one of them (by Stoyanov et al.) having received a specific award during the conference.
The MICCAI papers featured in this issue reflect the multidisciplinary nature of computer-assisted surgery, with papers on designing tools and robots to help the surgeon (Yao et al., Patronik et al.), registration and tissue deformation estimation (Stoyanov et al., Ma et al.), image overlay during intervention (Fichtinger et al.), and simulation and planning (Wilson et al.).
We would like to thank all the reviewers who devoted their time and effort to help us. Their contribution, together with the significant support from the journal editorial office, the MICCAI program board, and the MICCAI organizing board made this special issue possible.
Pierre Hellier
David R. Haynor
Christian Barillot
Guest Editors