Introduction: the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM) 2016: special focus on medical informatics and big data

In this editorial, we first summarize the 2016 International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2016) held on December 8–10, 2016 in Houston, Texas, USA, and then briefly introduce the ten research articles included in this supplement issue. At ICIBM 2016, a special theme, “Medical Informatics and Big Data,” was dedicated to the recent advances of data science in the medical domain. After peer review, ten articles were selected for this special issue, covering topics such as Knowledge and Data Personalization, Social Media Applications to Healthcare, Clinical Natural Language Processing, Patient Safety Analyses, and Data Mining Using Electronic Health Records.