Medical Image Analysis – past, present, and future

•Medical Image Analysis, the field, grew out of Computer Vision.•Medical Image Analysis is the flagship journal of the field.•MICCAI is the flagship meeting of the field. In this editorial I summarize, against the backdrop of the research disciplines, meetings and journals of the time, the emergence in the early 1990s of the field that is eponymous with the present journal. I briefly summarize the current status of the field, and outline some possible future directions.