Special section: Biomedical and bioinformatics challenges to computer science

The October 2009 special issue of Future Generation Computer Systems presents main computational and data management challenges arising in different bioinformatics and biomedical applications and propose a set of solutions. A first group of articles is related to the management, analysis, integration and visualization of data at the molecular level, while a second group discusses issues and solutions at higher or more complex levels, such as organ simulation and visualization for computer aided diagnosis and intervention. An article by Swain and co-workers discusses an important aspect of protein folding, the possibility to store and share protein folding and unfolding simulations to support further analysis, such as comparison among different experiments and mining of simulation data. An article by Campos and co-researchers present a new solution for cardiac electrophysiology modeling. Bułat and researchers present an article on the main problems arising in computer navigation systems used in computer aided surgery and intervention.