Teaching Tools: Cardiovascular Diagnosis For The Layman Biomedical Engineer

Understanding how a medical professional goes about their business on a day to day basis gives a product development engineer the type of base knowledge that can be built upon to gain a solid  appreciation for their needs.  The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a number of interactive labs that could serve that purpose.  This type of knowledge would be useful for a fledgling engineer to get a deeper insight into the general process used to diagnose and treat patients.  It should be noted that the patient interview, observation and reaction to a doctor’s first hand manipulations ( chest thump, reflex test, flexion of limbs, etc. ) are the initial and many times the only information the doctor needs to make a diagnosis.  The high technology diagnostic equipment comes into play only after the doctor gets stumped or wants to verify the diagnosis for medical or legal reasons ( defensive medicine ).  The following link allows the engineer to walk  through some of a doctor’s diagnostic process when cardiovascular disease is suspected.

HHMI Virtual Cardiology Laboratory

The 20 Smallest B.S. Biomedical Engineering Graduating Classes in 2008

There are any number of reasons why these are small graduating classes.  The most likely is that the listed schools have only recently inaugurated their Biomedical Engineering programs.   A number of schools took advantage of the Biomedical Engineering program grants by the now defunct Whitaker Foundation before it ceased to exist in 2005.   The foundation supported the creation of at least 30 programs.  Personally I don’t believe that a small graduating class has anything to do with the quality of a program.  It would be wise for prospective students and their parents to ask about plans for accreditation at these schools.

School	Male	Female	Total
George Washington University	9	7	16
Milwaukee School of Engineering	9	6	15
Wright State University-Main Campus	9	5	14
Bucknell University	6	8	14
Catholic University of America	8	4	12
Oregon State University	5	6	11
University of Nebraska-Lincoln	6	5	11
University of Akron Main Campus	6	4	10
University of the Pacific	6	2	8
Western New England College	3	5	8
Alfred University	2	5	7
LeTourneau University	3	3	6
University of Central Oklahoma	4	2	6
Washington State University	4	2	6
University of California-Riverside	3	3	6
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis	2	4	6
University of Houston	5	1	6
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo	3	2	5
The College of New Jersey	3	2	5
University of Idaho	1	0	1

Are Hemoglobin Blood Substitutes Coming To The End Of The Road?

Blood substitutes have been part of artificial organ research for a number of years.  They came in many forms.  Some of the early blood substitutes were fluorocarbon based.  Many were hemoglobin based as are all of the major contenders today.  I started working on blood substitutes around 1978 at Michael Reese as a Research Assistant working with Dr. Moss’ group.  Dr. Moss went on to create Northfield Corporation.  We parted company when he decided not to support liposome encapsulated hemoglobin research in his lab.  I continued to work on LEH for my dissertation at Rush Presbyterian St. Lukes Medical Center under the auspices of the Department of Anesthesiology.   I created a more commercially viable production technique and performed a number of experiments on rabbits, and rats to prove its efficacy.  Baxter supported the research and ultimately modified the process I created.  They were not unfortunately able to commercialize it for a number of reasons.  Besides technical issues the chief reason was the discovery of HIV.  There were no reliable tests at the time and my impression is that the risks were deemed to high to proceed.

In restrospect LEH blood substitutes could be considered one of the early pioneering attempts to develop biologically based pharmaceuticals.   It involved separation of the cytosol from the cell membrane by a series of chemical, centrifugation and cross flow filtration techniques.  Before it was encapsulated the hemoglobin rich cytosol was augmented with nutrients and cofactors to extend its shelf and circulating life.

Now it appears that hemoglobin based blood substitutes are at a cross roads.  With the advent of adult stem cell research and hobbled by a number of negative trials this approach appears to be headed for the history books.

Blood Not So Simple: Controversial Hemoglobin Substitutes on Life Support

Research: Silk Substrate Bioabsorbable Electronics Forge Ahead

Bioabsorbable electronics engineering research continues to advance with a range of new research results.  A trio of researchers have produced recent results which highlight the possibilities of silk as a substrate.  John Rogers, Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan have all published in this field. Working independently and cooperatively they are moving this field forward with other researchers.

Rogers

Self-assembled nanodielectrics and silicon nanomembranes for low
voltage, flexible transistors, and logic gates on plastic substrates

Kaplan, Omenetto

Bioactive Silk Protein Biomaterial Systems for Optical Devices

Kaplan, Omenetto, Rogers

Silicon electronics on silk as a path to bioresorbable, implantable devices

Original Article

Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics

Multitasking Not Necessarily The Smartest Way To Work

There is a growing body of evidence that indicates heavy multitasking or loading employees with a large number of tasks reduces their efficiency.  It appears that while technology can help to organize work the brain has  a limited capacity to work efficiently on more than one task at a time.   This is at odds with the seemingly constant demand for individuals within a corporation to do more with less.  In addition at least one study shows that older workers performance is less impacted by mobile phone and instant messages than younger workers.   The results imply that in a busy communications environment younger workers loose nearly all the advantage they may have in terms of cognitive speed.   Readers should take a look at the following articles to judge for themselves.

Older People Adapt Better To Technology Created Interruptions

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic

The Switching Gears Factor