7th Annual meeting of the German Society of Computer and Robot-assisted Surgery (CURAC.08)

This issue of the International Journal for Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (IJCARS) is a special issue representing the best contributions to the 7th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Computer and Robot-assisted Surgery (CURAC.08), which took place in September 2008 in Leipzig, Germany. At CURAC.08, we accepted 44 papers out of 83 submissions as full presentations for the conference program. Based on the ranked results of the review process with three reviews per contribution, we invited 18 authors to submit an expanded and updated version of their CURAC.08 contributions for this special issue. After a rigorousmulti-stage reviewprocess through International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, eight papers were finally accepted, and they are included in this issue. The contributions are organized in the common processing sequence ofmedical data and interventional applications. After segmenting anatomical data (Dworzak et al.), it is visualized pre(Hlawitschka et al.) and intra-operatively (Hansen et al., Schulze et al.). Furthermore, the use of a surgical tool