What are the main fields in Bioengineering?

According to the latest classification in bioengineering domain, there are mainly five types of bioengineers:

• The Clinical Engineer
• The Biomedical Design Engineer
• The Research Scientist
• The Rehabilitation Engineers
• The Technological Entrepreneur

The Clinical Engineer

The clinical engineer works in health care. They must understand the biological situation to apply his judgment and contribute his knowledge toward the solution of the given problem.

The Biomedical Design Engineer

The biomedical design engineer examines some portion of the biological or medical front and identifies areas in which advanced technology might be advantageous.

The Research Scientist

The research scientist is primary interested in applying engineering concepts and techniques to investigation and exploration of biological processes.

Rehabilitation Engineers

The Rehabilitation Engineers work with technology and computers to help individuals with disabilities to reach toward their maximum potential for an enjoyable and productive life. Helping the mentally disabled learn, providing a voice for those who cannot speak, and transportation for the physically handicapped are some of the activities of the rehabilitation engineer.

Technological Entrepreneur

The Technological Entrepreneur assumes that the gap between the technological education of the life scientist or the physician and current technological capability has become so great that the life scientist cannot pose a problem that will incorporate the application of the existing technology. Therefore, technological entrepreneurs examin some portion of the biological or medical front and identify areas in which advanced technology may be advantageous. Thus, they pose their own problem and then proceed to provide the solution, at first conceptually and then in the form of hardware or software.

What is the objective of a Bioengineer?

Biomedical engineering research has many objectives. One of them is designing and manufacturing medical products that will relief the human suffering. The development and use of those medical devices must be a joint effort of the bioengineer and the physician because bioengineering is a frontier science between medicine and engineering. For medical products there are used special materials called biomaterials. A biomaterial is any material, natural or man made, that comprises whole or part of a living structure or a biomedical device which performs or replaces a natural function that has been lost through disease or injury. The following materials can be used as biomaterials for manufacturing medical devices: metals and metal alloys (titanium, stainless steel, for total hip prosthesis etc), ceramics and glasses (used mainly as coating for metals to promote attachment to bone), polymers (for membranes, catheters, blood vessel prostheses, etc), composites (used in coatings, heart valves etc.). Before being used for a medical device, a biomaterial must be subjected to many tests (mechanical, biocompatibility, biological etc.). For example, a metallic biomaterial used for implants must be first of all corrosion resistant because corrosion can give corrosion products that are harmful for surrounding tissues. A polymeric biomaterial must be tested first against degradation because this usually produces alterations in the properties of the material and also it releases degradation products that may be harmful. Biomaterials are also tested for wear resistance, especially in implant surgery, because relative motion between parts can cause mechanical damage and release of small particles due to wear. For example, in joint replacement, wear debris has an adverse biological effect in that it stimulates the removal of bone.

What are difficulties in Bioengineering Research?

Bioengineers have a difficult task: they have to model, compute, predict and design. They implement the engineering science to medicine and for that they have to have strong knowledge in both fields.

There are many problems in bioengineering encountered in measuring/working with a living system. The human experimentation occurs whenever the clinical situation of the individual is consciously manipulated to gather information regarding the capability of drugs and devices. Experiments involving human subjects have been classified as either therapeutic or no therapeutic. A therapeutic experiment is one that may have direct benefit for the patient, whereas the goal of no therapeutic research is to provide additional knowledge without direct benefit to the person. The most important problem encountered in measuring a living system is the difficulty in gaining access to the variable being measured. Sometimes the measuring devices must be very small or it should be placed in areas in which it is impossible to place a proper device (i.e. brain). Where a variable is inaccessible for measurement, an attempt is often made to perform an indirect measurement- measure of some other related variable - but this process has of course, many limitations. Another problem encountered in bioengineering is that measurements taken under a fixed set of conditions at one time will not necessarily be the same as similar measurements made under the same conditions at another time. There is also a great variability from one subject to another. Because of the large number of feedback loops involved in a living system, a huge degree of interactions exists both within a given system and among the major system, stimulation of one part of a given system generally affects all other parts of that system and often affects other systems as well.

What is the Future of Bioengineering?

Many new ideas are being explored for the improvement of biomaterials. Currently, with the continued growth of molecular biology, it is becoming possible to construct artificial proteins. Also, it may eventually be possible to construct polymers, which the body cannot recognize as "foreign" or polymers for soft tissue replacement (e.g. tendon replacement)

In the future, biomedical engineering will develop ways to reduce heart disease and arherosclerosis, to provide improved vascular assist and replacement devices, to enhance oxygen transport in the lung, to control growth and change, to understand the mechanics of neuromuscular control and robotics, to prevent joint degeneration, to replace diseased organs, to avoid low back pain and many other applications.

As we saw above, biomedical engineering is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering based both in engineering and in life sciences. It provides the tools and techniques to make health care system more effective and efficient.