Purpose: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first SPIE Medical Imaging meeting, we highlight some of the important publications published in the conference proceedings.

Approach: We determined the top cited and downloaded papers. We also asked members of the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Imaging to select their favorite papers.

Results: There was very little overlap between the three methods of highlighting papers. The downloads were mostly recent papers, whereas the favorite papers were mostly older papers.

Conclusions: The three different methods combined provide an overview of the highlights of the papers published in the SPIE Medical Imaging conference proceedings over the last 50 years.