The optical medical imaging community has made slow but steady progress in the translation of optical bench instruments to implementation in the clinic as diagnostic devices. In order to facilitate this translation process and give clinicians relatively low-cost noninvasive devices to aid in monitoring patient health and disease state, it is necessary for the various people involved in this process—from the optical systems inventors, to the clinical end users as well as the device regulator—to have the capability to assess technologies with tools of scientific rigor. It becomes apparent, for all imaging technologies, that measurement standards are needed to expedite clinical translation.

A Workshop on Standards for the Advancement of Optical Medical Imaging was convened at the Gaithersburg campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology on 26–27 August, 2014. The workshop was attended by a broad swath of the optical medical imaging community. These included optical device developers from small groups and large companies, clinicians highlighting problem case studies, as well as regulatory agency representatives. Papers contributed to that meeting, as well as related papers, were submitted to this special section of the Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) and underwent rigorous peer review. The workshop as well as this special section focuses on methodologies that lead to solutions of standardization problems encountered in optical medical imaging.

The guest editors would like to thank the various contributors to the NIST workshop in 2014 and to this special section. We also wish to thank Lihong Wang, Editor-in-Chief of JBO, and Rita Davis and Gwen Weerts of the JBO Editorial Office.