Special Issue on Functional Imaging of the Heart Bin He and Boudewijn Lelieveldt Guest Editors Cardiovascular diseases represent a significant threat to public health. Of importance is to detect cardiovascular disorders in an early stage and to better guide intervention. Cardiac imaging has played an important role in both basic cardiovascular research and clinical cardiology. Of particular interest is the recent development in functional imaging of the heart. Innovative imaging methods have been developed to image the functional status of the heart from magnetic resonance, electrical, mechanical, acoustic, and optical measurements among others. These functional imaging techniques have shown great promises to reveal the underlying mechanisms of cardiovascular diseases and offer potential means of aiding clinical diagnosis and management of cardiac disorders. This Special Issue will highlight new approaches to the exciting field of cardiac functional imaging, including new functional imaging modalities, new analysis techniques to derive functional information from existing measurement systems, and novel approaches for validation and clinical applications of cardiac functional imaging. Original submissions in areas including, but not limited to, the following topics, are invited: . Novel functional cardiac imaging modalities . Electrophysiological cardiac imaging . Model-based functional imaging . Magnetic resonance imaging . Magnetic resonance spectroscopy . PET imaging of cardiac function . Novel contrast mechanisms . Analysis methods for rest-stress studies . Strain and strain-rate imaging . Fusion of information on coronary, global and regional function . Imaging and quantification of cardiac dyssynchrony . Quantitative assessment of valve function . Computer-aided diagnosis of cardiac pathologies . Quantification of changes in longitudinal cardiac imaging studies . Visualization . Validation . Clinical applications involving novel imaging techniques The IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging seeks high-quality original research papers for this Special Issue. Authors should submit their manuscripts electronically through the IEEE Manuscript Central Office (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmi-ieee) following the TMI Instructions for Authors and indicating in the Author Comments to the Editor-in-chief that the manuscript be considered for the special issue on Functional Imaging of the Heart. Authors intending to submit articles are encouraged to discuss their submissions with the Guest Editors to determine suitability for this Special Issue. Guest Editors: Bin He, PhD Department of Biomedical Engineering University Minnesota 7-105 NHH 312 Church Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA Phone: +1 612 626 1115 e-mail: binhe@umn.edu Boudewijn Lelieveldt, PhD Division of Image Processing Department of Radiology, 1-C2S Leiden University Medical Center P.O. Box 9600 2300 RC Leiden The Netherlands Phone: +31 (0)71 526 1117 e-mail: B.Lelieveldt@lumc.nl Schedule: Submission of manuscripts: 1st January 2008 Acceptance/rejection notification: 1st April 2008 Revised manuscripts due: 1st June 2008 Publication Special Issue: October 2008