Machine learning has been well applied and recognized as an effective tool to handle a wide range of real situations, including medical applications. In this scenario, it can help to alleviate problems typically suffered by researchers in this field, such as saving time for practitioners and providing unbiased results. This tutorial is concerned with the use of machine learning techniques to solve different medical problems. We provide a survey of recent methods developed or applied to this context, together with a review of novel contributions to the ESANN 2016 special session on Machine learning for medical applications.