Translational biomedical informatics is rapidly emerging as a new discipline to meet the demand on translational medicine research, which integrates data from medical research, biotechnologies, and electronic medical records. Computational systems medicine is to apply computational and systems biology approaches to solving complex problems in medical research, aiming to improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of complex diseases. Research activities in these areas have been seen rapidly expanding, largely due to the huge volume of data generated from high throughput technologies such as next generation sequencing that can be linked to the clinical information database as well as many other biological and medical knowledge databases.

The 1st International Conference on Translational Biomedical Informatics http://ictbi.imed-cn.org/english/index.html, to be held on December 8–10, 2012, in China, will cover many exciting and emerging bioinformatics and translational science topics. The authors whose papers will be published in the proceedings of ICTBI 2012 are invited to submit the extended version of their papers to this special issue.

The main focus of this special issue will be both the new theories and tools and the applications in translational biomedical informatics and computational systems medicine. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• “-omics” data integration and analysis in complex disease
• Next generation sequencing data analysis and application in medicine
• Systems biology-related research in biomedicine
• Biomedical signal processing and medical imaging analysis combing with “-omics” or clinical data
• High performance and/or cloud computing in biomedical research
• Structure information and biomedical function of biomolecules
• Text mining and NLP in biomedical research
• System level modeling and simulation of complex disease
• Visualization of complex data in medicine

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/bmri/bioinformatics/tbi/ according to the following timetable: