It is a pleasure for us to present the contributions of the First International Symposium on Medical Data Analysis. Traditionally, the eld of medical data analysis can be devided into classical topics such as medical statistics, sur- val analysis, biometrics and medical informatics. Recently, however, time series analysis by physicists, machine learning and data mining with methods such as neural networks, Bayes networks or fuzzy computing by computer scientists have contributed important ideas to the led of medical data analysis. Although all these groups have similar intentions, there was nearly no exchange or discussion between them. With the growing possibilities for storing and ana- zing patient data, even in smaller health care institutions, the need for a rational treatment of all these data emerged as well. Therefore, the need for data exchange and presentation systems grew also. The goal of the symposium is to collect all these relevant aspects together. It provides an international forum for the sharing and exchange of original re- arch results, ideas and practical experiences among researchers and application developers from di erent areas related to medical applications dealing with the analysis of medical data. After a thorough reviewing process, 33 high quality papers were selected from the 45 international submissions. These contributions provided the di erent - pects of the eld in order to represent us with an exciting program.
