摘要：Welcome to the fourth issue of R News, the newsletter of the R project for statistical computing. This is the first special issue of R News, with an emphasis on applying R in medical statistics. It is special in many ways: first, it took longer to prepare than we had originally antipicated (which typically seems to happen for special issues). Second, the newsletter file is rather large as there are many exciting images—in fact, in trying to keep the size reasonable, in some cases images are only included at a lower resolution, with the “real stuff” available from the respective authors’ web pages. And finally, articles are fewer but longer: as many of the applications described are based on recent advances in medical technology, we felt that extra space with background information was warranted.
