Fifty years of SPIE Medical Imaging proceedings papers.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first SPIE Medical Imaging meeting, we highlight some of the important publications published in the conference proceedings. We determined the top cited and downloaded papers. We also asked members of the editorial board of the to select their favorite papers. There was very little overlap between the three methods of highlighting papers. The downloads were mostly recent papers, whereas the favorite papers were mostly older papers. The three different methods combined provide an overview of the highlights of the papers published in the SPIE Medical Imaging conference proceedings over the last 50 years.