Dear Colleagues,

Worldwide, around 10% of all births are preterm. Preterm children are those born before 37 weeks gestational age; very early preterm birth is before 32 weeks, while early preterm birth occurs between 32 and 36 weeks. As the timespan of gestation decreases, the risk of complications caused by preterm birth significantly increases. It has been predicted that 4.2% of all surviving preterm babies will have a severe disability at 18 years, and that a further 18.5% will have a milder disability. Early detection of impairments is an important strategy to improve the well-being of children and their families, allowing for developmental monitoring and medical evaluation of the specific type of disorder that affects a child and optimize therapeutic options. This Special Issue is devoted to bioengineering solutions for (early) detection of impairments and/or interventions connected with preterm birth. This includes the following areas:

Machine learning for preterm neonatal care applications;
Big data analytics;
Medical image processing and signal processing;
Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs);
Precision medicine;
Biology and bioinformatics;
Neuroscience and computational neuroscience;
IoT for Healthcare;
Computational modeling in biological systems and medicine.

Dr. Aleksander Sadikov
Dr. Vida Groznik
Guest Editors