It is a pleasure for us to present the contributions of the First International Symposium on Medical Data Analysis. Traditionally, the eld of medical data analysis can be devided into classical topics such as medical statistics, sur- val analysis, biometrics and medical informatics. Recently, however, time series analysis by physicists, machine learning and data mining with methods such as neural networks, Bayes networks or fuzzy computing by computer scientists have contributed important ideas to the led of medical data analysis. Although all these groups have similar intentions, there was...