The International Workshop on Holography in Medicine and Biology was held in MUnster, Federal Republic of Germany, on March 14th and 15th, 1979, at the Clinic of Otorhinolaryngology of the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat within the frame of the Symposium 79 of the Sonderforschungsbereich 88 "Teratology and Rehabilitation of Patients with Multiple Handicaps'' of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In fact, this workshop was not the first meeting dealing exclusively with biomedical applications of holography and related techniques. The very first symposium in this field was organized by Prof. P. Greguss and took place in New York in 1973. A second one was held in MUnster in 1976 with the objec tive to improve the communication among the at that time rather isolatedly working groups in this research domain. The great response to that meeting gave encouragement to the organization of another one in MUnster, this time on a more extended international base. Thus, this workshop attracted 85 scientists from 13 countries, i.e. Austria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Fed. Rep. of Germany, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands, USA, Yugoslavia."

As there recently has been increased interest in the applications of optical techniques in biomedical research and clinical diagnostics, it seemed to be appropriate to organize a comprehensive international conference on optics in medicine and biology. Such a broad international meeting had not been held before. An international conference on Optics in Biomedical Sciences was organized and took place in Graz, Austria, September 7th through 11th, 1981, sponsored by the International Commission for Optics (ICO) in co operation with the European Optical Committee, the Austrian Association on Biomedical Engineering, and the German Society for Applied Optics. It seemed timely to establish a forum for communication among specialists on an international level. This book, presenting the papers given at this conference, demonstrates the state of the art of this increasingly expanding field of applications of optics. Furthermore, the interested reader will find an extended list of references in the various contributions. This book helps to overcome the difficulty, inherent in all interdisciplinary research fields, of gathering widely scattered literature. The contributions to this book are focussed on the following topics: Biomedical applications of - unconventional imaging in microscopy, - image processing, - interferometry and holography, - speckle-techniques and spectroscopy, - optometry, and - Moire methods. In addition, the brilliant and humorous closing remarks of Nils Abramson from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, have been included."