Soft computing (SC) obtains inexact solutions to computationally hard tasks such as the NP-complete problems, for which there is no known algorithm that can obtain an exact solution in polynomial time.

Soft computing differs from conventional hard computing (HC) in that SC is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation.

Recently, SC has attracted close attention of researchers and has also been applied successfully to solve problems in bioinformatics and biomedicine. Nevertheless, the amount of information from biological experiments and the applications involving large-scale high-throughput technologies is rapidly increasing nowadays. Thus, the ability of being scalable across a range of large-scale problems becomes an essential requirement for modern soft computing approaches.

The scope of this special session covers the development of computational models and algorithms for bioinformatics and biomedicine. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Microarray and gene expression analysis
• Gene regulatory and ontology networks
• Protein and RNA structure prediction
• Analysis of large biological datasets
• Data integration and fusion
• Classification and clustering
• Feature selection
• Signal processing
• Radiology and imaging
• Text mining in molecular biology
• Gene regulation and transcriptomics
• Molecular docking and drug design
• Metabolic pathway analysis
• Image analysis in bioinformatics
• Computational proteomics

Besides, contributions containing new insights and findings in this field are welcome. Approaches to address the above-mentioned topics should involve soft computing methods like neural networks, SVM, fuzzy logics, evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, chaos theory, and perceptron.

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/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/tswj/computer.science/etso/ according to the following timetable: