For the past decade or so, Computational Intelligence (CI) has been an - tremely "hot" topic amongst researchers working in the ?elds of biomedicine and bioinformatics. There are many successful applications of CI in such areas ascomputationalgenomics,predictionofgeneexpression,proteinstructure,and protein-protein interactions, modeling of evolution, or neuronal systems mod- ing and analysis. However, there still are many problems in biomedicine and bioinformatics that are in desperate need of advanced and e?cient compu- tional methodologies to deal with tremendous amounts of data so prevalent in those kinds of researchpursuits. Unfortunately, scientists in both these ?elds are very often unaware of the abundance of computational techniques that could be put to use to help them analyze and understand the data underlying their research inquiries. On the other hand, computational intelligence practitioners are often unfamiliar with the particular problems that their algorithms could be successfully applied for. The separation between the two worlds is partially caused by the use of di?erent languages in these two spheres of science, but also by a relatively small number of publications devoted solely to the purpose of facilitating the exchange of new computational algorithms and methodologies on one hand, and the needs of the realms of biomedicine and bioinformatics on the other. Inordertohelp?llthegapbetweenthescientistsonbothsidesofthisspectrum, wehavesolicitedcontributionsfromresearchersactivelyapplyingcomputational intelligencetechniquestoimportantproblemsinbiomedicineandbioinformatics. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of powerful state-of-the-art methodologiesthatarecurrentlyutilizedforbiomedicine-and/orbioinformati- orientedapplications,sothatresearchersworkinginthose?eldscouldlearnofnew methodstohelpthemtackletheirproblems. Ontheotherhand,wealsohopethat the CI community will ?nd this book useful by discovering a new and intriguing area of applications.
The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of powerful state-of-the-art methodologies that are currently utilized for biomedicine and/ or bioinformatics-oriented applications, so that researchers working in those fields could learn of new methods to help them tackle their problems. On the other hand, the CI community will find this book useful by discovering a new and intriguing area of applications. In order to help fill the gap between the scientists on both sides of this spectrum, the editors have solicited contributions from researchers actively applying computational intelligence techniques to important problems in biomedicine and bioinformatics.
The book is divided into three major parts. Part I, Techniques and Methodologies, contains a selection of contributions that provide a review of several theories and methods that could be (or to some extent already are) of great benefit to practitioners in the fields of biomedicine and bioinformatics dealing with problems of data exploration and mining, search-space exploration, optimization, etc. Part II of this book, Computational Intelligence in Biomedicine, contains a collection of contributions on current state-of-the-art biomedical applications of CI in clinical oncology, neurology, pathology, and proteomics. Part II, Computational Intelligence in Biomedicine, contains a collection of chapters treating on applications of CI methods to solving bioinformatics problems including protein structure and function prediction, protein folding, finding ribosomal RNA genes, and microarray analysis.
