this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th international conference on visualization in biomedical computing, vbc 96, held in hamburg, germany, in september 1996.the 73 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 232 submissions. the book reports the state of the art in the field of computer based visualization in medicine and biology. the papers are organized in sections on visualization; image processing; segmentation; registration; brain: description of shape; brain: characterization of pathology; brain: visualization of function; simulation of surgery and endoscopy; image guided surgery and endoscopy.