In the Spotlight: Biomedical Signal Processing A Well Established Discipline or a Paradigm to Promising Integrated Visions?

B IOMEDICAL signals carry fundamental informationabout the nature and the status of the living systems under study. A proper processing of these signals obtains useful physiological and clinical information. Many advanced algorithms of signal and image processing have recently been introduced and therefore enhanced selective information may be achievable, provided they cope well with the presence of strong sources of noise or low signal/noise ratio. Second-order or higher-order approaches provide a wide variety of complex processing tools for information enhancement procedures: several applications are also considered using parametric and non parametric time-frequency, time-variant and time-scale analysis, as well as nonlinear dynamics analysis [1], [2]. Given the general definition of Biomedical Signal Processing (BSP) introduced above, most often, when applying for research grants in the European Union (EU) (and this is also true for other funding organizations) it is of primary importance to match as much as possible the topic of the proposed research with the basic objectives of the Call for Proposals. Therefore, a common experience for BSP experts who want to apply for the EU grants is that it is widely assumed that BSP is not an appealing topic “per se ” and most of the EU officers dishearten European sci-entists to use BSP as a keyword for their proposal. There is a common feeling among these officers that BSP is a well-estab-lished discipline and there are only a few aspects worth to be investigated from a basic research point of view. In contrast, BSP is considered by the Bioengineering Community as a nec-essary step in most in biomedical research proposals which in-stead have to be better focused towards well defined keywords as pointed out in the relative announcements. For example, i