General chairs´ message

Advances in circuits and systems engineering are driving a technology revolution in the life sciences, enabling effective and sustainable solutions to pressing problems in medicine and health care. The annual IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) Conference has become the premier forum for bringing together scientists, engineers, medical researchers, and health care practitioners to drive these advances and share in cross-cutting research at the interface between circuits, systems, biology, and medicine. Since our inaugural conference in 2005, the BioCAS community has been growing steadily. In 2007, the flagship journal in this field was launched, the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. This year BioCAS 2011 set a new record for the number of submissions to the technical program with 199 papers and 18 demonstration abstracts submitted. As the BioCAS community and conference grow, we have maintained the founding spirit of the conference by continuing as a single-session meeting with an acceptance rate lower than the recent Conference average to ensure a high quality level. The BioCAS 2011 Program Committee, through the hard and diligent work of 45 review committee members, has coordinated 427 reviewers to conduct 740 reviews to assure the highest quality of the technical program and select the best examples of our community´s output. 103 papers were accepted for oral (31) and poster (72) presentation, and 16 special session papers were accepted. The acceptance rate for regular papers was 56.6%. In keeping with BioCAS tradition, the Conference includes a full day of tutorial presentations by internationally recognized researchers as well as daily keynote presentations that support the BioCAS 2011 theme, Engineering Tomorrow´s Healthcare.