This volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science presents the scientific proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Breast Imaging (IWDM 2012), which was held July 8–11, 2012 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Formerly called the International Workshop on Digital Mammography, the new name recognizes the move in breast imaging towards more recent emerging technologies and multimodality imaging solutions. The IWDM meetings bring together a diverse group of researchers, clinicians and representatives of industry, who are jointly committed to developing technology for early detection and subsequent patient management of breast cancer. The conference series was initiated at a 1993 meeting of the SPIE in San Jose, with subsequent meetings hosted every two years by researchers around the world. Previous meetings have been held in York (1994), Chicago (1996), Nijmegen (1998), Toronto (2000), Bremen (2002), Durham (2004), Manchester (2006), Tucson (2008) and Girona (2010).

The IWDM 2012 was designed as a platform to present the latest technological developments and clinical experiences of novel breast imaging technologies, including digital mammography, tomosynthesis, CT, MR, ultrasound, optical and molecular imaging. Additional topics include multimodality imaging, image processing and visualization, and computer-aided imaging. A total of 120 papers were submitted to the conference from research groups in 24 countries. Each four-page extended abstract was reviewed in a fully-blinded process by at least two members of the Scientific Program Committee, which led to the final selection of 42 oral presentations and 58 poster presentations. The final 8-page papers were reviewed by the volume editors. Galley proofs were approved by the corresponding author (s) of each paper.