Biomedical engineering (BME) or medical engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes. This field seeks to close the gap between engineering and medicine, combining the design and problem solving skills of engineering with medical biological sciences to advance health care treatment, including diagnosis, monitoring, and therapy. Also included under the scope of a biomedical engineer is the management of current medical equipment within hospitals while adhering to relevant industry standards. This involves making equipment recommendations, procurement, routine testing and preventive maintenance, a role also known as a Biomedical Equipment Technician (BMET) or as clinical engineering.
A simulation is an approximate imitation of the operation of a process or system; that represents its operation over time.
Medical cybernetics is a branch of cybernetics which has been heavily affected by the development of the computer, which applies the concepts of cybernetics to medical research and practice. It covers an emerging working program for the application of systems- and communication theory, connectionism and decision theory on biomedical research and health related questions.
In engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, computational biology, meteorology and computer science, multiscale modeling or multiscale mathematics is the field of solving problems which have important features at multiple scales of time and/or space. Important problems include multiscale modeling of fluids, solids, polymers, proteins, nucleic acids as well as various physical and chemical phenomena.
The Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) is a European initiative that focuses on a methodological and technological framework that, once established, will enable collaborative investigation of the human body as a single complex system. The collective framework will make it possible to share resources and observations formed by institutions and organizations, creating disparate but integrated computer models of the mechanical, physical and biochemical functions of a living human body.
This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM). For a broad overview of engineering, please see Engineering. For biographies please see List of engineers and Mechanicians.
Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) is an approach to design products, the materials that comprise them, and their associated materials processing methods by linking materials models at multiple length scales. Key words are "Integrated", involving integrating models at multiple length scales, and "Engineering", signifying industrial utility. The focus is on the materials, i.e. understanding how processes produce material structures, how those structures give rise to material properties, and how to select materials for a given application. The key links are process-structures-properties-performance. The National Academies report describes the need for using multiscale materials modeling to capture the process-structures-properties-performance of a material.
Physiomics is a systematic study of physiome in biology. Physiomics employs bioinformatics to construct networks of physiological features that are associated with genes, proteins and their networks. A few of the methods for determining individual relationships between the DNA sequence and physiological function include metabolic pathway engineering and RNAi analysis. The relationships derived from methods such as these are organized and processed computationally to form distinct networks. Computer models use these experimentally determined networks to develop further predictions of gene function.
OpenSim is an open source software for biomechanical modeling, simulation and analysis. Its purpose is to provide free and widely accessible tools for conducting biomechanics research and motor control science. OpenSim enables a wide range of studies, including analysis of walking dynamics, studies of sports performance, simulations of surgical procedures, analysis of joint loads, design of medical devices, and animation of human and animal movement. The software performs inverse dynamics analysis and forward dynamics simulations. OpenSim is used in hundreds of biomechanics laboratories around the world to study movement and has a community of software developers contributing new features.
VPHOP or the Osteoporotic Virtual Physiological Human is a European osteoporosis research project within the framework of the Virtual Physiological Human initiative.
William Ward Armstrong is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1966 and is most known as the originator Armstrong's axioms of dependency in a Relational database.
The Microgravity Centre, colloquially known as the "MicroG", at PUCRS university, Porto Alegre, Brazil, was initially created as a laboratory in 1999 by Professor Thais Russomano MD MSc PhD, as the first academic and research establishment dedicated to Space Life Sciences in Latin America. It evolved into a fully multidisciplinary centre in 2006, expanding its areas of research beyond aerospace medicine and engineering, to include pharmaceuticals, biomechanics and physiotherapy, among others. The MicroG is now an internationally recognised and leading research centre in diverse fields of knowledge, producing numerous relevant studies. Professor Russomano remained as Coordinator of the research centre until July 2017.
Medical image computing (MIC) is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer science, information engineering, electrical engineering, physics, mathematics and medicine. This field develops computational and mathematical methods for solving problems pertaining to medical images and their use for biomedical research and clinical care.
Scott L. Delp, Ph.D., is the James H. Clark Professor of Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He is the Founding Chairman of the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford, the Director of the National Center for Simulation in Rehabilitation Research (NCSRR), Simbios, the NIH Center for Physics-Based Simulations of Biological Structures at Stanford., and the Mobilize Center, a data science research center focused on mobile health.
Cardiophysics is an interdisciplinary science that stands at the junction of cardiology and medical physics, with researchers using the methods of, and theories from, physics to study cardiovascular system at different levels of its organisation, from the molecular scale to whole organisms. Being formed historically as part of systems biology, cardiophysics designed to reveal connections between the physical mechanisms, underlying the organization of the cardiovascular system, and biological features of its functioning.
Tendon-driven robots (TDR) are robots whose limbs mimic biological musculoskeletal systems. They use plastic straps to mimic muscles and tendons. Such robots are claimed to move in a "more natural" way than traditional robots that use rigid metal or plastic limbs controlled by geared actuators. TDRs can also help understand how biomechanics relates to embodied intelligence and cognition.
An in silico clinical trial is an individualised computer simulation used in the development or regulatory evaluation of a medicinal product, device, or intervention. While completely simulated clinical trials are not feasible with current technology and understanding of biology, its development would be expected to have major benefits over current in vivo clinical trials, and research on it is being pursued.
Dimitris Metaxas is a distinguished professor and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, where he directs the Center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling (CBIM).
The Virtual Soldier Research program (VSR) is a research group within the University of Iowa Center for Computer-Aided Design (CCAD). VSR was founded by Professor Karim Abdel-Malek in 2003 through external funding from the US Army Tank Automotive Command (TACOM) to put the Warfighter at the center of US Army product designs. Using this initial research and funding as a foundation, VSR continues to develop new technologies in digital human modeling and simulation.
Inverse dynamics-based static optimization is a method for estimating muscle-tendon forces from the measured kinematics of a given body part. It exploits the concepts of inverse dynamics and static optimization. Joint moments are obtained by inverse dynamics and then, knowing muscular moment arms, a static optimization process is carried on to evaluate optimal single-muscle forces for the system
