The Scientific World Journal
Special Issue on 
User-Centric Healthcare Data Analysis
Call for Papers 
Big data is rapidly becoming the key issue of the modern connected world. Large volumes of storage and increasing computing power, coupled with the wide variety of data sources mean that big data is being assembled in every area of life. The biomedical domain is a key example of this: technologies such as next generation sequencing, robust new medical devices, personal electronic health records, mobile applications and social networks with population health data will need to be coherently harnessed in order to maximise benefit.
The future of healthcare is envisioned as a system that empowers people to interact more proactively with clinicians to lead to better treatment outcomes. Multi-dimensional challenges, however, are presented within this new healthcare scenario. They involve appropriate data management, data acquisition, fusion, integration, update and security, to the final analysis.
A further key emerging idea, is the realisation that the results of big data analytics are themselves complex and multi-faceted, including issues of knowledge representation, uncertainty and interpretability. It is no longer sufficient to ‘simply’ run and algorithm on data and present the answer ‘as is’ to the user. A new suite of techniques and tools is needed in which users can explore the results of analysis; and different users may have different exploratory needs. In short, user-centric data analysis is needed, combining aspects of visualisation, presentation and interactivity, to communicate the analysis results in an appropriate manner.
The purpose of this special issue is to bring together novel approaches for healthcare which addresses some of these issues from raw data. Hence, we seek to create a volume that introduces developments in areas such as:
•	Acquisition and interfacing for medical data
•	Decision support systems for professionals and patients
•	Patient guidance services, e.g. predictive algorithms of patient health status
•	Personalised medicine in healthcare systems
•	Digital representation and visualisation of health data to improve  diagnosis and treatment
•	Biomedical and bioinformatics data integration and analysis
•	Knowledge extraction from image data sets
•	Emerging knowledge discovery of genetic causes of diseases
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/tswj/computer.science/hda/ according to the following timetable:
Manuscript Due	December 19, 2014
First Round of Reviews	March 13, 2015
Publication	May 08, 2015

Lead Guest Editor
Uwe Aickelin – School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK; [log in to unmask] 
Guest Editors 
Jenna Reps – School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK; [log in to unmask]
Paulo Lisboa - School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences,  Liverpool John Moores University, UK; [log in to unmask]
Grazziela Figueredo – Advanced Data Analytics Centre, University of Nottingham, UK; [log in to unmask]
Nelson Ebecken, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; [log in to unmask]