Integrative medicine (IM) is a new branch in the healthcare systems of many countries across the world. Integrative medicine combines conventional western medicine with a medical model that emphasizes body, mind, social function, and evidence-based medicine.

Global biomedical research is entering a new era, characterized by big data and artificial intelligence (AI), and biomedical informatics is a crucial area of research in IM. This focuses on the combination of observational and empirical research with new technologies featuring mathematics, rational derivation, and applications of artificial intelligence, such as big data and machine learning. This new domain provides an ideal solution for simulation studies and for the full utilization of the available big data accumulated over recent decades.

This Special Issue aims to provide a cross-disciplinary forum for innovative biomedical research that provides high-quality evidence for the promotion of integrative medicine. Its scope covers original studies on bioinformatics, medical informatics, clinical decision making, and medical informatics technology with a rigorous scientific basis. It also serves as a cutting-edge forum to bring together scientists from interdisciplinary backgrounds such as computer science, biology, artificial intelligence, big data, medical science, mathematics, and biostatistics. We especially welcome submissions relating to state-of-the-art computational methods using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and statistical models that can effectively improve the quality of evidence for IM in a big data context. We welcome both original research and review articles.

This Conference Issue is being run in partnership with the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), held as an online event from the 9th to 12th December (https://www.ieeebibm.org/BIBM2021/). Whilst submissions are invited from all researchers, we particularly welcome full-length articles from both attendees and those that have submitted abstracts and posters for consideration at this conference.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Pathway analysis of herbal medicine components and acupuncture
• Biological network analysis on herbal medicine components and acupuncture
• Integrative medicine interventions in gene expression and regulation
• Big data analytics for real-world integrative medicine
• Information retrieval, ontologies, natural language processing, and text mining for integrative medicine
• Computational modeling and data integration for conventional medicine and integrative medicine
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence for conventional medicine and integrative medicine
• Application of big data analysis for conventional medicine and integrative medicine
• Biomedical image analysis
• Health information and decision support systems for conventional medicine and integrative medicine