This book complements the successful series of Workshops on the Au­ tomation of Cytogenetics which have been sponsored for more than a decade by the European Community (EC). The contributed papers all arise from pre­ sentations at one of the last three such Workshops, in Berlin (1986), Cortona (1987) and Langollen (1988). Collaborative cytogenetics automation research and development activities in Europe are now supported by the "Concerted Action in Automation of Cytogenetics" (CAACG), as one of the activities of the EC's COMAC-BME committee which supervises the coordination of re­ search in biomedical engineering within the Medical Technology Development target (project no. 11.1.1/13). The structure of EC programme for medical and health research is described on the following pages. The book presents the state of the art in the automation of cytogenet­ ics, comprising 20 papers by researchers, developers and users of cytogenetics automation. Topics covered include evaluations of complete image-based chro­ mosome analysis systems which have resulted from the successful collaboration between European researchers and industry, current active research into new image analysis techniques (with particular emphasis on techniques for auto­ mated segmentation of chromosome clusters), the development of systems for chromosome aberration scoring, automatic specimen preparation, and the use of flow cytometry for chromosome measurement and analysis.