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Special Track on Knowledge Discovery and Knowledge-based 
Techniques and Systems in Medicine
(http://www.win.tue.nl/~mpechen/conf/cbms2008/)
at 21th IEEE Int. Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, 
IEEE CBMS 2008 Jyvaskyla, Finland, 17-19 June 2008
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---  1st CALL FOR PAPERS  ---

Advances in automatic data collection motivate the development 
of tools that are able to handle and analyze data and make use 
of it in a computer-supported fashion. Data mining has become 
a popular and effective way of discovering new knowledge from 
large and complex data sets, and particularly, medical data 
sets. Advances in data mining research and technology have 
made it possible to solve many interesting problems in medical 
diagnostics and healthcare.

As part of the symposium, the Special Track on Knowledge 
Discovery and Knowledge-based Techniques and Systems in 
Medicine invites original and high quality submissions 
addressing all aspects of knowledge representation and 
discovery, data mining and machine learning with application 
to the medical context.
This year we emphasize the openness of this track to a wider 
range of topics that cover different aspects of knowledge- 
oriented tools and systems including not only knowledge 
discovery and data mining- related aspects, but also more 
general aspects of knowledge-based techniques and systems in 
medical domains.

The topics of special interest include, but are not restricted 
to, the following:

- effective machine learning and data mining tools in medical
  applications
- classification
- clustering
- feature selection and feature transformation
- data streams and longitudinal data analysis
- mining medical data with time- and context-changing patterns
  and data distributions
- mining complex heterogeneous medical data including signals,
  images, clinical data, genomic and proteomic data
- visualization of data and data mining results
- case studies based on large medical databases
- evaluation and interpretation of data mining results
- knowledge-driven data mining approaches
- cost-sensitive data mining
- personalization and adaptation of medical information 
  systems and services
- medical knowledge elicitation and representation
- expert (knowledge-based) systems
- integration of background knowledge in computer-based
  medical systems

This year the track includes A Special Session on Machine 
Learning Methods for High-Dimensional Data in Bio-medicine 
that is focused on an important problem of data complexity in 
terms of its dimensionality, sparsity and availability of 
labeled examples. To overcome these challenges different ways 
can be
identified: the incorporation of domain specific knowledge, 
inherent regularizing methods, domain specific data 
representation, and other. Further, quality control and 
confidence estimation are important key issues of the machine 
learning tools and models for successful application in 
industry and research.

The special session invites papers that cover the following 
not-exclusive list of topics:
- self-regularizing methods
- incorporation of domain-specific knowledge into the learning
  model
- processing of structured data and structure output
- standardized strategy for application specific data
  processing
- generalization abilities and sparse data
- partially labelled data and semi-supervised models
- processing of uncertainty information.

Unlike workshops, where position papers and reports on initial 
and intended work are appropriate, papers selected for a 
special track should report on significant unpublished work 
suitable for publication as a conference paper.

-- IMPORTANT DATES --

January 28, 2008 	 Submission of paper (IEEE 2-column,6p. max)
March 1, 2008	 Notification of acceptance
March 28, 2008	 Final camera-ready paper due
March 28, 2008	 Pre-registration deadline
June 17-19, 2008 	 Symposium

-- SUBMISSION PROCEDURES --

Submissions (6 pages max, IEEE two-column format, including 
figures and references) will be done electronically via the 
CBMS 2008 web submission system. Each accepted paper will be 
published in the conference proceedings by IEEE CS Press. For 
more details please see: http://cbms2008.it.jyu.fi/ and 
http://www.win.tue.nl/~mpechen/conf/cbms2008/.

-- TRACK CHAIRS --

Mykola Pechenizkiy	TUE, the Netherlands
Seppo Puuronen		University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Alexey Tsymbal		Siemens AG, Germany

-- SPECIAL SESSION CHAIRS --

Thomas Villmann 		University Leipzig, Germany 
Frank-Michael Schleif 	University Leipzig, Germany 
Markus Kostrzewa 		Bruker Daltonik Leipzig, Germany

-- TRACK PROGRAMME COMMITTEE --
PC list is available from the website of the special track at 
http://www.win.tue.nl/~mpechen/conf/cbms2008/

For further questions, please contact m.pechenizkiy@tue.nl