Telemedicine has the potential to significantly alter structures, procedures, and eventually outcomes in healthcare structures worldwide. Today the field of telemedicine is still dominated by very committed efforts of research and development. However, there is a growing number of concepts and applications which have been implemented in clinical routine or are ready to be implemented. Health care providers, patients, third party payers, and not at least policy makers should be informed about these rapidly emerging applications, which could have a considerable impact on the delivery of health care. This book offers a comprehensive source of information not only for experts but also for the target groups mentioned above. It provides background information on legal aspects, issues concerning further development, and evaluation of telemedicine applications. The work also presents numerous projects covering the clinical fields of emergency medicine, surgery, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, ophthalmology, dermatology, radiology, pathology, psychiatry and other clinical specialties. Recognizing the Internet as a major source of information on issues related to telemedicine and information technology in general, a 'Webliography' provides links to a selection of the most relevant Web sites on the Internet.

Current demographic, economic and social conditions which developed countries are faced with require a paradigm change for delivering high quality and efficient health services. In that context, healthcare systems have to turn from organization-centered to process-oriented and finally towards individualized patient care, also called personal care, based on ehealth platform services. Interoperability requirements for ubiquitous personalized health services reach beyond current concepts of health information integration among professional stakeholders and related Electronic Patient Records.Future personal health platforms particularly have to maintain semantic interoperability among systems using different modalities and technologies, different knowledge representation and domain experts' languages as well as different coding schemes and terminologies to include home care, as well as personal and mobile systems. This development is not restricted to regions or countries, but appears globally, requiring a comprehensive international collaboration. This publication within the series "Studies in Health Technology and Informatics" presents papers from leading international experts representing all domains involved in ehealth.

Biomedical Engineering is defined as the science that integrates medical and engineering sciences to improve diagnosis and treatment of patients. Only by this integration progress can be achieved. Both medical and engineering sciences comprise a huge diversity in topics, so it is imaginable that Biomedical Engineering, combining these two science areas, is even more huge. Thanks to this megadisciplinary approach many breakthroughs can be achieved. More and more research groups realize this and start new research projects, which results in a rapid increase in knowledge in Biomedical Engineering. This will only benefit the main goal of Biomedical Engineering; improving diagnosis and treatment of patients when it is spread and applied. The 2nd Regensburg Applied Biomechanics conference is special in that it realized both the distribution of new knowledge and the essential integration of medical and engineering specialists. The conference dealt with the latest results in applied biomechanics, ranging from fundamental bone strength properties via bone remodeling phenomena to new implants that replace lost human functions. Also new research areas like robot surgery and tissue engineering were discussed.