this book constitutes the refeered proceedings of the 18th interational conference on information processing in medical imaging, ipmi 2003, held in uk, in july 2003. the 57 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from submissions. the papers are organized in topical sections shape modeling, shape analysis, segmentation, color, performance characterization, registration and modeling similarity, registration and modeling deformation, cardiac motion, fmri analysis, and diffusion imaging and tractography.