Medical images nowadays play an essential role in detection and diagnosis of numerous diseases. Ranging from anatomical information, functional activities, to the molecular and cellular expressions, medical imaging provides direct visualization means to see through the human bodies and observe the minute anatomical changes and biological processes characterized by different physical and biological parameters. Informative as they are, medical imaging usually requires experienced medical doctors to best interpret the information revealed in the images. However, because of various subjective factors as well as limited analysis time and tools, it is quite common that different medical doctors may come up with diverse interpretations, leading to different diagnoses. Moreover, for the same set of medical imaging, a medical doctor may make different diagnosis results at different time.

To attain a more reliable and accurate diagnosis, recently, varieties of computer-aided detection (CAD) and diagnosis (CADx) approaches have been developed to assist interpretation of the medical images. At least four types of efforts may be identified among these CAD and CADx approaches. The first type is to assist in visual detection and qualitative analysis of the objects of interest in the medical images by either enhancing the salient features of the objects or suppressing the background noises. The second type is to assist in extraction of the objects of interest for further quantitative analyses by such techniques as boundary delineation, tree-structure reconstruction, and fiber tracking. The third type is to automatically detect and classify the objects of interest by integrating the data mining, medical image analysis, and signal processing technologies. The fourth type is to estimate the anatomical and functional tissue properties not explicitly revealed in the medical images based on mathematical modeling, for example, physiology, biomechanics, heat transfer, and so forth.

This special issue aims to present the state-of-the-art CAD and CADx algorithms for medical images. While all four types of works are welcome, those new CAD and CADx algorithms with clinical or biological validation are particularly encouraged. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Enhancement and visualization methods for improving visual detection and diagnosis
• Segmentation algorithms for 3D lesions, organs, skeletons, vessels, airways, and so on
• Fiber structure extraction algorithms
• Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and multimodality image registration algorithms
• Lesion and abnormality detection algorithms in volume images
• High-performance CAD and CADx algorithms for clinical applications
• Anatomical and functional parameter estimation based on mathematical modeling

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cmmm/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/cmmm/cad/ according to the following timetable: