Editors’note: This is the first of a series of articles on the 17 projects in the European Community's biomedical engineering programme. Dr Podo is Project Leader for‘Imaging techniques—nuclear magnetic resonance’; the project's objectives being‘the identification and characterization of biological tissues by NMR. Methods of operation are the development of standardized methods for measuring NMR relaxation properties; the development of test objects; collection of NMR relaxation data and associated histopathological and biochemical information; and assessment of the safety of NMR in clinical use’. The Community's full programme, together with an explanation of the history and organisation of the EC, was described in our last issue (Vol. 9, No. 2, p. 61) by Jan E. W. Beneken, B. H. Brown and W. Skupinski.