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© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Introduction The aim of this special issue is to introduce the burgeoning topic of artificial intelligence (AI) in health and medicine and to showcase some of the recent developments and novel applications of AI in health and medicine fields. AI, defined by Oxford Dictionary, is the theory and development of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, and translation between languages. With the rapid advance of technology, AI techniques are being effectively used in the fields of health and medicine to improve the efficiency of treatments and avoid the risks of false diagnosis, the making of therapeutic decisions and the prediction of outcome in many clinical scenarios. Modern medicine is faced with the challenge of acquiring, analysing and applying the large amount of knowledge necessary to solve complex problems [1]. AI in health and medicine mainly uses computer techniques to perform clinical diagnoses and suggest treatments. This special issue provides a forum for the publication of articles that address broad challenges on both theoretical and application aspects of AI in health and medicine. The development of medical artificial intelligence has been related to the development of AI programs intended to help the clinician in the formulation of a diagnosis, the making of therapeutic decisions and the prediction of outcome. They are designed to support healthcare workers in their everyday duties, assisting with tasks that rely on the manipulation of data and knowledge. In this issue, we invited scholars and researchers to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate the continuing effort on the application of AI approaches to solve health and medical problems. The open call for this special issue has attracted eighteen papers (18) covering broad range of artificial intelligence technologies and applications. After two rounds of peer-reviews by a team of international experts, 14 papers were selected to be included in this special issue and currently 1 paper is under in 3rd revision. Those accepted papers represent a wide spectrum of research under the theme of the special issue ranging from breast cancer detection, of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) disease identification, to big medical data handling. In “Summary of accepted papers” section, we present a brief summation of the selected papers for this special issue and “Conclusion” section provides concluding remarks.