IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE, VOL. 1, NO. 1, MARCH 1997 1 Editorial Biomedical Information Technology: Medicine and Health Care in the Digital Future Swamy N. Laxminarayan, Senior Member, IEEE, Jean Louis Coatrieux, Fellow, IEEE, Christian Roux, Senior Member, IEEE, Stanley M. Finkelstein, Senior Member, IEEE, Alan V. Sahakian, Senior Member, IEEE, and Susan M. Blanchard, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—Advancements in medicine and health care are being significantly influenced by the exploding information technol- ogy developments. The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE will address the applications and the infrastructure innovations that would harness biomedical and health care programs in the 21st century. I. EMBS AND THE T-ITB A. Welcome A S THIS seminal issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE (T-ITB) is about to go to press, I want to take advantage of the opportunity to extend a special welcome to all our readers and subscribers, both the present and the prospective. The launching of the T-ITB initiative is an outcome of the foresight of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society’s (EMBS) 1995 Publications Committee chaired at the time by the current President, Prof. John Enderle, and later accomplished through months of intense efforts by an ad hoc information technol- ogy task force set up during Dr. Janie Fouke’s Presidential tenure. Heading this task force was one of my very enjoyable challenges in my professional career and one in which I had the great pleasure of interacting with several international experts in the field whose comments and suggestions were most valuable in developing the content structure of this TRANSACTIONS. B. Information Technology: Quo Vadis Information technology is a discipline that defies all bounds and barriers and has clearly demonstrated the most amazing developmental “curve” that no other discipline has ever wit- nessed or generated during what sounds like a mere “nano” time span. While the Internet has captured much of the world’s attention and continues to do so, the issues surrounding its functionalities, as well as its inevitability as an “everyday” tool in the future, are becoming more complex and constrained each day. Network traffic congestion, information security, address space, universal access, and high bandwidth requirements are just a few examples that characterize the current state of af- fairs. The continued search for newer solutions for addressing these issues, has resulted in the evolution of Internet’s other “adjuncts.” In that framework, one talks about such projects and protocols as the Internet II, the very-high-speed backbone Publisher Item Identifier S 1089-7771(97)03900-9. network services (vBNS), the experimental information-wide- area-year (I-WAY), the next-generation Internet protocol IPv6 and the recently announced next-generation Internet initiatives (NGI). While Internet II has been described as the future “fast lane” Internet for the academic community, vBNS offers the benefits of an Internet “fast lane” for the research and education (R&E) community [1]. With the changing nature of the Internet, the current Internet protocol (IP) is rapidly becoming obsolete giving rise to the next-generation IP, the IPv6 (Internet protocol version 6), a protocol standardized to carry us through into the next century [2]. The Internet’s success story coupled with the need for universal information access by all citizens of the world triggered the creation of the national and global information infrastructure (NII/GII) concepts. The Internet paradigm has been viewed by many as a precursor to and a leading model of the National Information Infrastructure’s design and implementation. As the cornerstone of high-end information technology applications, we as re- searchers and technologists feel lure of the significant benefits offered by programs like the high-performance computing and communications (HPCC) (www.hpcc.gov) as well as the forthcoming next-generation Internet initiatives (NGI) that are under way. As President Clinton emphasized in his recent State of the Union Address, “We must build the second generation of the Internet so that our leading universities and national laboratories can communicate at speeds one thousand times faster than today, to develop new medical treatments, new sources of energy, new ways of working together.” President Clinton has recently announced a 20-member advisory com- mittee on HPCC and NGI which includes Dr. Sherrilynne Fuller, a member of T-ITB’s Editorial Board. We offer our best wishes to Dr. Fuller. The new Committee is created to provide guidance and advice on all areas of HPCC, information technology, and NGI (www.hpcc.gov). Two major disciplines that have been and will continue to benefit from such developments are medicine and health care. Numerous biomedical applications have already expounded on the role and impact of the “digital future” that medicine and health care hold [3]. It is this trend and context that we have explored in setting up the scope and standards of T-ITB. C. Rationale and Goals With the emergence of a wide class of enabling technologies such as fiber optic systems, integrated services digital networks 1089–7771/97$10.00  1997 IEEE