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MBEC is the official journal of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering, IFMBE, and can proudly look back on 45 years of publication. In 2006, important changes were implemented for MBEC. A new editorial team took office, Springer became the publisher, the publication frequency doubled, and we switched to a fully web-based manuscript handling system, facilitating online submission and exchange with reviewers. Through the combined efforts of the IFMBE and Springer in implementing and promoting the innovations, the number of submissions grew substantially in 2006, allowing the editors to meet the increased number of papers to be published while at the same time raising the reviewers’ threshold for accepting manuscripts. This resulted in a healthy acceptance rate of 30%. These developments are good for the journal and will help to increase its impact over time. The first Editor in Chief of MBEC was Alfred Nightingale, a very active man who died too young in 1963 at the age of 40, just before the first issue was launched. He was the then President of the Biological Engineering Society, which subsequently became part of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, IPEM, when it was founded in 1995. In 1943, he worked for the British admiralty on electronic underwater sound detectors which may be seen as a precursor of the present day ultrasound technology and joined the physics department of Guy’s Hospital in 1947. In honor of this biomedical engineer ‘avant la lettre’ IPEM in association with the IFMBE has revived the annual Nightingale Prize for the best scientific paper in MBEC. The selection of this paper is in the hands of the Editorial Board of MBEC. As editors we continuously appraise the quality of MBEC’s papers. A good measure of quality is provided by the grades given by reviewers. Since the ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’ a better measure of quality would be the number of citations to a paper. However, the winner of the 2006 Nightingale Prize had to be selected in July 2007, which does not allow sufficient time for a citation score to be developed. As an alternative, we considered the highest download frequency as an initial selection criterion and the top eight were put before the Editorial Board as jury [2–9]. Papers with one of the editorial board members as first author were excluded. Obviously, jury members were not allowed to vote for a paper on which he/she was an author. The finalist papers covered a variety of topics including instrumentation, imaging, bio (fluid) mechanics, modeling, and signal processing. This list illustrates the scientific breadth of our journal as a prominent feature representing the multidisciplinary disposition of our research community. The papers originated from Japan and different European countries, reflecting the international status of the journal. The United States was not represented in this year’s list, but the award went to this country last year [1]. The 2006 winning paper [4] is entitled ‘Optimal wavelets for biomedical signal compression’ by authors Mogens Nielsen, Ernest Nlandu Kamavuako, Michael Midtgaard Andersen, Marie-Françoise Lucas and Dario Farina. The paper represents combined research efforts of the Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction at the Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark, and the IRCCyN of the École Centrale de Nantes, France. It is an exemplary paper that the editors like to see J. A. E. Spaan (&) Department of Medical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Academic Medical Center, PO Box 22700, 1100 DE Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: j.a.spaan@amc.uva.nl; MBEC@amc.uva.nl

The Nightingale Prize for the best scientific paper published in MBEC 2006