This book (vol. 1) presents the proceedings of the IUPESM World Congress on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, a triennially organized joint meeting of medical physicists, biomedical engineers and adjoining health care professionals. Besides the purely scientific and technological topics, the 2018 Congress will also focus on other aspects of professional involvement in health care, such as education and training, accreditation and certification, health technology assessment and patient safety. The IUPESM meeting is an important forum for medical physicists and biomedical engineers in medicine and healthcare learn and share knowledge, and discuss the latest research outcomes and technological advancements as well as new ideas in both medical physics and biomedical engineering field. Chapter "Evaluation of the Impact of an International Master of Advanced Studies in Medical Physics" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO Licence via link.springer.com.

This book (vol. 2) presents the proceedings of the IUPESM World Congress on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, a triennially organized joint meeting of medical physicists, biomedical engineers and adjoining health care professionals. Besides the purely scientific and technological topics, the 2018 Congress will also focus on other aspects of professional involvement in health care, such as education and training, accreditation and certification, health technology assessment and patient safety. The IUPESM meeting is an important forum for medical physicists and biomedical engineers in medicine and healthcare learn and share knowledge, and discuss the latest research outcomes and technological advancements as well as new ideas in both medical physics and biomedical engineering field.

This, the 24th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains extended and revised versions of seven papers presented at the 25th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2014, held in Munich, Germany, in September 2014. Following the conference, and two further rounds of reviewing and selection, six extended papers and one invited keynote paper were chosen for inclusion in this special issue. Topics covered include systems modeling, similarity search, bioinformatics, data pricing, k-nearest neighbor querying, database replication, and data anonymization.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This, the 18th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains extended and revised versions of seven papers presented at the 24th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2013, held in Prague, in the Czech Republic, in August 2013. Following the conference, and two further rounds of reviewing and selection, five extended papers and two invited keynote papers were chosen for inclusion in this special issue. The subject areas covered include argumentation, e-government, business processes, predictive traffic estimation, semantic model integration, top-k query processing, uncertainty handling, graph comparison, community detection, genetic programming, and web services.

This two volume set LNCS 8644 and LNCS 8645 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2014, held in Munich, Germany, September 1-4, 2014. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 46 short papers, and 2 keynote talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The papers discuss a range of topics including: data quality; social web; XML keyword search; skyline queries; graph algorithms; information retrieval; XML; security; semantic web; classification and clustering; queries; social computing; similarity search; ranking; data mining; big data; approximations; privacy; data exchange; data integration; web semantics; repositories; partitioning; and business applications.

This two volume set LNCS 8644 and LNCS 8645 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2014, held in Munich, Germany, September 1-4, 2014. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 46 short papers, and 2 keynote talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The papers discuss a range of topics including: data quality; social web; XML keyword search; skyline queries; graph algorithms; information retrieval; XML; security; semantic web; classification and clustering; queries; social computing; similarity search; ranking; data mining; big data; approximations; privacy; data exchange; data integration; web semantics; repositories; partitioning; and business applications.

This two volume set LNCS 8055 and LNCS 8056 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, August 23-29, 2013. The 43 revised full papers presented together with 33 short papers, and 3 keynote talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 174 submissions. These papers discuss a range of topics including: search queries; indexing; discovery of semantics; parallel processing; XML and RDF; enterprise models; query evaluation and optimization; semantic Web; sampling; industrial applications; communities; AI and databases; matching and searching; information extraction; queries, streams, and uncertainty, storage and compression; query processing; security; distributed data processing; metadata modeling and maintenance; pricing and recommending; and security and semantics.

This two volume set LNCS 8055 and LNCS 8056 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, August 23-29, 2013. The 43 revised full papers presented together with 33 short papers, and 3 keynote talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 174 submissions. These papers discuss a range of topics including: search queries; indexing; discovery of semantics; parallel processing; XML and RDF; enterprise models; query evaluation and optimization; semantic Web; sampling; industrial applications; communities; AI and databases; matching and searching; information extraction; queries, streams, and uncertainty, storage and compression; query processing; security; distributed data processing; metadata modeling and maintenance; pricing and recommending; and security and semantics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, September 2012, in conjunction with DEXA 2012. The 12 revised long papers and 3 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address the following topics: medical data mining and information retrieval; metadata models, prediction and mobile applications; systems biology and data mining in bioinformatics. The papers show how broad the spectrum of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engineering and medical informatics is.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2011, held in Toulouse, France, in August/September 2011, in conjunction with DEXA 2011.

The 13 long papers and 5 short papers were carefully selected and address the following topics: decision support and data management in biomedicine; medical data mining and information retrieval; workflow management and decision support in medicine; and classification in bioinformatics. The papers show how broad the spectrum of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engineering and medical informatics is.

This book (vol. 3) presents the proceedings of the IUPESM World Congress on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, a triennially organized joint meeting of medical physicists, biomedical engineers and adjoining health care professionals. Besides the purely scientific and technological topics, the 2018 Congress will also focus on other aspects of professional involvement in health care, such as education and training, accreditation and certification, health technology assessment and patient safety. The IUPESM meeting is an important forum for medical physicists and biomedical engineers in medicine and healthcare learn and share knowledge, and discuss the latest research outcomes and technological advancements as well as new ideas in both medical physics and biomedical engineering field.

Biomedical engineering and medical informatics are challenging and rapidly growing areas. Applications of information technology in these areas are of paramount imp- tance. The aim of the first ITBAM conference was to bring together scientists, - searchers and practitioners from different disciplines (mathematics, bioinformatics, biology, medicine, biomedical engineering and computer science) having such c- mon interests. We hope that ITBAM conferences will provide opportunities for fru- ful discussions between all attendees and provide a platform where participants can exchange their most recent results, identify future directions and challenges, initiate possible collaborative research and system development, and develop common l- guages for solving problems in the realm of biomedical engineering, bioinformatics and medical informatics. The importance of computer-aided diagnosis and therapy has drawn more and more attention worldwide and laid the foundation for modern medicine with excellent potential for promising applications such as telemedicine, Web-based healthcare and analysis of genetic information. For this conference, after a peer-review process, we finally selected 13 long papers and 8 short papers that are now published in this volume. They are divided in to the following groups: workflow management and database; decision support and data management in biomedicine; medical data modelling and information retrieval; data mining in bioinformatics; knowledge representation and data management in bio- formatics; biological data and signal processing. The papers show how broad the spectrum of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engine- ing and medical informatics is.