Abstract
We provide a brief history of the applications of artificial intelligence to medicine and biology, focusing on the period between 2000 and the present, not only to review significant accomplishments but also to introduce the current state of the art and prospective challenges. We also provide a brief overview of the chapters of this book, which aims to introduce the reader to current studies and applications of artificial intelligence in the life sciences. The chapters describe innovative scientific findings that resulted from the work of highly interdisciplinary teams in which computer scientists, mathematicians, and biomedical engineers closely cooperated with medical doctors and biologists to produce new knowledge, design faster and more reliable diagnostic and clinical methods, develop data processing and knowledge extraction techniques that enable them to operate on large data sets describing complex systems and processes.