The current scientific and technical literature in the fields of medi- cine and engineering, in addition to learned society journals, embraces textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings. The last of these cate- gories is potentially of prime importance given the increasing pace at which knowledge is advancing. However, traditional conference proceedings often tend to be indigestable, both due to their excessive volume and to the un- evenness of the ingredients. Here we have attempted to overcome these deficiencies by selecting a set of contributions which, in our opinion, in the best sense convey the flavour of the 4th IMEKO Conference on "Advances in Biomedical Measurement". This meeting, which took place in Bratislava in May, 1987, was held concurrently with the 1st Regional Conference of the Socialist European Countries on Biomedical Engineering and the 2nd Czecho- slovak Conference on Biomedical Engineering. From more than 200 papers presented in 14 sessions, 56 contributions have been selected to represent four major areas within which advances in biomedical measurement are occurring.
These are: measurement and instru- mentation (including prosthetics); signal and image processing; modelling and simulation; and decision support. The process of deciding which authors should be invited to contribute to this volume was not always easy. What we have tried to do is to achieve a mix which provides an overview of the state of the art across this broad spectrum of endeavour.