The European Society for Arti?cial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) was - tablished in 1986 following a very successful workshop held in Pavia, Italy, the year before. The principal aims of AIME are to foster fundamental and applied research in the application of arti?cial intelligence (AI) techniques to medical care and medical research, and to provide a forum at biennial conferences for discussing any progress made. For this reason the main activity of the society wastheorganizationofaseriesofbiennialconferences,heldinMarseilles,France (1987), London, UK (1989), Maastricht, The Netherlands (1991), Munich, G- many (1993), Pavia, Italy (1995), Grenoble, France (1997), Aalborg, Denmark (1999),Cascais,Portugal(2001),Protaras,Cyprus(2003),Aberdeen,UK(2005), and Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2007). This volume contains the proceedings of AIME 2009, the 12th Conference on Articial Intelligence in Medicine, held in Verona, Italy, July 18-22, 2009. The AIME 2009 goalswereto present and consolidate the internationalstate of the art of AI in biomedical research from the perspectives of theory, meth- ology, and application.
The conference included two invited lectures, full and short papers, tutorials, workshops,and a doctoral consortium. In the conference announcement, authors were solicited to submit originalcontributions regarding the developmentoftheory,techniques, andapplications ofAI in biomedicine, - cluding the exploitation of AI approaches to molecular medicine and biomedical informaticsandto healthcareorganizationalaspects. Authorsofpapersaddre- ing theory were requested to describe the properties of novel AI methodologies potentially useful for solving biomedical problems.