Healthcare has various dimensions. Image processing, medical image analysis, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and so forth are contributing to the development of healthcare. Automatic understanding of human health and illness has tremendous demand for the prevention, management, and treatment of human beings. This understanding, from low-level image processing to higher-level analysis, is progressing day by day. Hence, a special issue is needed which will cover the advancements of imaging, vision, and related issues for the development of healthcare. Integration of various cues and modalities will enhance the performance.

This special issue endeavors to cover the broad spectrum that benefits from the automatic understanding of medical healthcare image analysis and related topics. This special issue targets high-quality research papers as well as review articles covering both the challenges and applications of image processing and vision in healthcare, for the betterment of human life.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Medical imaging for healthcare
• Vision systems in healthcare applications
• Pattern recognition related to healthcare
• Healthcare big data
• Data mining in healthcare
• Multimodal integration for healthcare
• Affective computing
• Biometrics for healthcare
• Action/emotion/behavior analysis for healthcare
• Smart homes for aged care
• Related databases
• Instrumentations related to healthcare
• Virtual human, nurse, and so forth for healthcare
• Assistive technologies
• Aspects on constraints, applications, and future issues