Introduction to the special issue on case-based reasoning in the health sciences

There has been an explosion of interest in health sciences applications of case-based reasoning (CBR), not only in the traditional CBR in medicine domain, but also in bioinformatics, enabling home health-care technologies, CBR integration, and synergies between CBR and knowledge discovery. This special issue features the best papers from the third workshop on CBR in the health sciences, held at ICCBR-05 in Madrid. It is the third in a series of exciting workshops, the first two of which were held at ICCBR-03, in Trondheim, Norway, and at ECCBR-04, in Madrid, Spain. The nine high-quality papers introduced here represent the research and experience of twenty-two authors working in eight different countries on a wide range of problems and projects. These papers illustrate some of the major trends of current research in CBR in the health sciences, and represent overall an excellent sample of the most recent advances of CBR in the health sciences.