National EFMI Member Society: Czech Society for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics
Short overview: The Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics is one of the medical societies gathered in the Czech Association of Medical Societies of J.E. Purkyne. The Medical Informatics Section of the Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering has been established in 1978.

Through this section the activities in the field of medical informatics has been developed. Nowadays the Society is mostly concerned with activities in three sections: "Medical Informatics", "Clinical Engineering", and "Biophysics".

The Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering is the member of International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE).

The Society is ruled by the general board of eleven elected society members. The president of the Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics is J. Cmíral, the Medical Informatics Section is headed by J. Zvárová (IMIA representative), the Clinical Engineering Section by V. Grospic and Biophysics Section by Z. Grossman.

The Czech Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics has issued the journal "Physician and Technology", edited by J. Zvárová. The journal is published bimonthly and basic information about the journal can be found at the www address: lat.euromise.cz.

The medical informatics section of the Society has organized the main activities in the field of medical informatics. Apart from several national seminars held on different topics of medical informatics each year, the conferences on medical informatics were held in Prague 1981 and 1988, and IMIA international working conference took place in Prague in 1985 and 1990.

The proceedings of the IMIA working conferences were published by Elsevier Publishing Company (North Holland) under the titles "Diagnostic Strategies and Expert Systems" and "Knowledge, Information and Medical Education".

In 2004 the Society organized or co-organized several national and international conferences e.g. Biosignal, Brno and 51st Neurophysiological Congress, Srní. It highly co-operated in the IMIA working conference "Statistical Methodology in Bioinformatics and Clinical Trials" held in frame of the International Joint Meeting EuroMISE 2004 in Prague, Czech Republic, April 12-14, 2004 (www.euromise2004.org).

The programme committee of the IMIA confernce was chaired by Casimir A. Kulikowski, USA and Norbert Victor, Germany. The programme was divided into 8 scientific sessions covering topics on bioinformatics, bridging hospital information systems and clinical trials, microarrays analysis, statistical methods in clinical research and epidemiology, decision support and data mining, computational statistics and clinical genetics. The proceedings of abstracts were published (ISBN 80-903431-0-4) and full versions of selected papers will be published in a special issue of the journal Methods of Information in Medicine.

The Society is the main organizer of the forthcoming EMBEC'05 - 3rd European Medical & Biological Engineering Conference, Prague, Czech Republic 20.11.-25.11.2005.