The past decade has seen a rapid growth in the demand for the usage of human behavioral and physiological characteristics for e-security and forensics applications.  The significant advances in biometrics techniques are increasingly incorporated in a number of other applications in this context, and medicine has emerged as the largest and the most promising area.  Medical biometrics primarily refers to the usage of human behavioral and physiological characteristics for medical diagnosis and body care.  Thus, the goal of medical biometrics is to explore solutions to the open problems in medicine using biometric measurements, technologies, and systems.

ICMB 2008 was the first major gathering in the world devoted to facilitate this interaction.  This conference provided a forum to discuss practical experiences in applying state-of-the–art biometric technologies for medical diagnosis and body care which will further stimulate research in medical biometrics.  ICMB 2008 witnessed 40 technical presentations and 9 invited talks.  In addition to the regular sessions, this conferences also organized a workshop on Computerized Traditional Chinese Medicine (C-TCM) that focused on oriental techniques in medical biometrics.  The conference attracted several quality presentations on medical diagnosis using tongue imaging, iris imaging, MRI, ultrasound imaging,  and pulse measurements.

The conference featured three keynote talks from Prof. Max A. Viergever, Prof. Heinz-Otto Peitgen, and Prof. Tadashi Watsuji.  The keynote talks were presented on topics of increasing importance in medical biometrics.  While delivering the opening, the President of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Prof. Chung-kwong Poon, noted that the research in medical biometrics is opening new frontiers.  The new efforts in biometrics have resulted in new technologies for e-security and forensics.  However, these technologies remain largely unexplored for their usage for medical diagnosis and healthcare.  The Natural Science Foundation of China (NSF-C) was one of the key sponsors of this conference.  Dr. Zhang Zhao Tian, Director (Information Dept.) NSF-C, welcomed the conference delegates for fruitful technical interactions to further stimulate the research in medical biometrics.

The conference was the first in a series to provide a forum to discuss experiments in applying biometric technologies for medical diagnosis and body care.  The papers presented in this conference were published as a volume in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series by Springer.

First International Conference on

Medical Biometrics

ICMB 2008

 

Hong Kong

4-7 January 2008

General Chair:

David Zhang

Proceedings of ICMB 2008

are available in the

Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series, Volume 4901, Medical Biometrics

 

 

Prof. Heinz-Otto Peitgen delivering his keynote talk.

Prof. Max A. Viergever receiving a souvenir from General Chiar Prof. David Zhang after delivering his keynote talk.

Prof. Chung-kwong Poon, President of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, delivering his welcome address.