For the past two decades, the Optical Society of America has been organizing biennial topical meetings under the conference name BIOMED [1]. The presentations covered in this meeting are at the heart of biomedical optics, and the diversity of meeting themes covered has continued to grow with the application areas of the field. The papers published in this issue of Biomedical Optics Express are contributions from authors who presented their work at this past meeting, in April/May 2012 held in Miami FL.

The meeting covered four full days of talks and posters in the areas of (1) Biomedical Applications of Digital Holography, (2) BioNanophotonic and Molecular Probes, (3) Optical Microscopy Techniques, (4) Photoacoustic Imaging and Spectroscopy, (5) Optical Coherence Tomography, (6) Optical Imaging and Tomography, and (7) Optical Spectroscopy. The conference was chaired by Dr. Claude A. Boccara (France), Dr. Xingde Li (USA) and Dr. Lev T. Perelman (USA). The intent of the conference is to bring together people to present in all of these areas, and every two years to repeat this conference. It has run every two years in Florida since 2002 and is planned to continue again in 2014 and beyond.

This issue bands together 25 papers submitted to Biomedical Optics Express from talks and posters that were presented at the BIOMED 2012 conference.