Preface

The 2012 7th International Symposium on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics (HIBIT 2012) is organized by the Informatics Institute, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. This conference was initiated seven years ago with the objectives of: (a) starting a series of high quality international scientific conferences in Turkey in the subject area, (b) bringing together the research community in Turkey and in other countries, (c) supporting especially young researchers in the area, and (d) and getting together with the industry for further cooperation. The first HIBIT, held in November 2005, was a great success with more than 70 participants from more than 10 different countries. This year´s conference was announced to a very large international crowd, including universities, centers and hospitals. We received 42 papers from 15 different countries and 24 papers are accepted for oral presentation. Moreover, 39 very high quality abstracts are accepted for poster presentations. We also organized several workshops including the Clinical Bioinformatics Workshop, Translational Bioinformatics Workshop, and the Medical Image Analysis Workshop. This year, we also host the International Society for Computational Biology (ICSB) Regional Student Group Symposium at HIBIT. Our invited speakers and lecturers are worldwide experts in bioinformatics and health informatics. The conference includes sessions in these two areas.