Medical applications as a growth area for genetic and evolutionary computing

Within the last week we've been notified of several new citations to GPEM articles on medical/pharmaceutical applications, which is consistent with my impression that this is a particularly promising growth area for the field.

Our special issue on "Medical Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation" (guest editors Stephen L. Smith and Stefano Cagnoni) was published in December of 2007, and we have published related work both before and after that special issue -- for example we published "Use of genetic programming to diagnose venous thromboembolism in the emergency department" by Milo Engoren and Jeffrey A. Kline in March, 2008, and two relevant articles in September, 2008 ("Genetic programming for medical classification: a program simplification approach" by Mengjie Zhang and Phillip Wong, and "Analysis of mass spectrometry data of cerebral stroke samples: an evolutionary computation approach to resolve and quantify peptide peaks" by Julio J. Valdes, Alan J. Barton, and Arsalan S. Haqqani). Also upcoming and now in Online First: "Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis" by Stephan M. Winkler, Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner.

I think that there's  a lot of potential here both for new applications and for GPEM to bring more of the ongoing work to the broader research community. I would encourage researchers who work in this area to contact me about possibilities.