IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE, VOL. 7, NO. .... as Associate Editors and as Reviewers. I want to extend a warm.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE, VOL. 7, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2003
Editorial
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S MANY of you know, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE (T-ITB) was launched in 1997 with Professor Swamy Laxminarayan as the first Editor-in-Chief (EiC). I took over as EiC beginning of 2002. This is my second “annual” editorial as EiC of these TRANSACTIONS. My first editorial, however, was not printed inside the covers of this journal but in the December issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING (T-BME). This issue comprised selected papers that had been reviewed and accepted for publishing in T-ITB. The reasons for publishing these in another IEEE/EMBS journal were twofold. First, T-BME was seen an excellent platform to promote awareness of the existence of T-ITB and, second, it allowed us to reduce the accumulated backlog of accepted papers queueing to be printed. One year later, it is clear that this decision benefited T-ITB. Compared to 2002, the submission of new manuscripts has doubled thanks to active promotion in conferences and through contacts with researchers. The Administrative Council of EMBS also decided to increase T-ITB’s page budget for 2003 by 35%. This combined with the December 2002 issue in T-BME has allowed us to get rid of the paper backlog problem. From 2004 onwards, accepted papers can generally be printed in the next issue of the TRANSACTIONS. The rejection rate is going up, leading to higher quality papers being accepted. Our impact factor from 2002 compares rather favorably against our main competitors. However, there is still much room for improvement. An interesting statistic concerns the regions from where our submissions originate. One might expect that North America (Regions 1-6 and Region 7) would be leading, but this is not the case. In fact, Asia, part of Region 10, accounts for roughly 40% of the submissions with Europe (as the most active part of Region 8) close behind with 35%, leaving North America behind with only 25%. These numbers have been quite stable in 2002 and 2003. The T-ITB scope has been revised and the text appears regularly on the inside back cover of T-ITB issues. A simple definition of T-ITB’s scope is that it is the union of two domains; information technology on one hand, and health, healthcare, or biomedicine on the other. In the past , T-ITB has attracted quite a lot of submissions dealing with medical image systems. These are in the scope of this journal and we are happy to continue receiving manuscripts from this area. However, we need to make certain that what we publish fits our redefined scope. Therefore, our editorial policy in this area has been clarified as follows: Papers dealing with, e.g., compression, visualization and multi-
modality aspects, including image fusion are within our scope. Whereas, papers dealing with image segmentation, registration (coalignment), enhancement, and reconstruction are considered to be outside our scope. In addition to defining what medical image systems content fits in the scope of T-ITB, we have identified several emerging areas of research and applications of IT in health and healthcare that we want to promote. Consequently, early in 2003, we announced invitations for papers to three special issues. These are as follows. • Emerging Mobile Technologies for Health Applications, mHealth (Guest Editors: Professor Robert S. H. Istepanian, U.K., Dr. Emil Jovanov, USA, and Professor Yuan-Ting Zhang, Hong Kong). • Knowledge Management and IT for Healthcare (Guest Editors: Dr. Rajeev K. Bali, U.K., Professor David Dagan Feng, Australia, and Dr. Frada Burstein, Australia). • Pervasive Healthcare (Guest Editors: Prof. Ilkka Kor-honen, Finland, and Dr. Jakob E. Bardram, Denmark). The deadline for submissions expired for the mHealth issue a few months ago. In total 28 manuscripts were received indicating a very strong interest in the area. The papers are currently going through our normal peer review process and the mHealth issue will be printed in 2004. In addition to these we are also discussing special issues on “Wearable systems for eHealth” based on a high level international workshop planned to take place in December 2003 and on “Interoperable informatics in postgenomic biology and medicine.” The above shows an increasing interest to publish in these TRANSACTIONS, but it also puts more pressure on the timely and proactive management of the peer-review process. Our webbased Manuscript Central is an excellent tool to manage the review process. One of my surprises as Editor-in-Chief has been that so many of our colleagues who work in this domain seem to have a mental barrier in making use of the services of the web site. Could it be that we do not practice what we preach? Finally, to end this commentary, this issue includes a list of the names of the persons who have volunteered their valuable by providing critical and valuable feedback to prospective authors as Associate Editors and as Reviewers. I want to extend a warm thanks to them all for their efforts so far and hope that we’ll be able to rely on them also in the future.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITB.2003.822183
1089-7771/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
NIILO SARANUMMI, Editor-in-Chief VTT Information Technology Human Interaction Technologies Tampere, FIN-33101 Finland
