EVOLUTION IN THE TURF OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
By Hasan Al-Nashash, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, American University of Sharjah, UAE
O
ver the years, the struggle against disease brought medical doctors and engineers
together to create a strong bonding relationship leading to the emergence of the multidisciplinary field of biomedical engineering. Such a relationship provided healthcare with a vast range of services including sensors, materials, imaging modalities, prosthetic devices, and signal processing. The processes of analyzing, designing, and manufacturing of these complex devices and systems fall within the engineering practice. Nevertheless, biomedical engineering was not recognized as a discipline until recently. Many initiatives have served to
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recognize biomedical engineering. In 1951, the American Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), previously known as the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), formed a Professional Group on Medical Electronics. In 1960, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a committee to evaluate applications in the field of biomedical engineering. Johns Hopkins University was one of the pioneers in establishing an academic program in biomedical engineering in 1961. Since then, biomedical engineering has become one of the fastest growing engineering majors in the US where the growth rate reached more than 200% between the years 2000 and 2009.
Based on statistics published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the New York Times published that biomedical engineering is the number one new job of the coming decade where a growth of 72% is expected by 2018. These statistics reflect the continuously growing interest in this field. In the next section, we will try to address
two important questions: what exactly is biomedical engineering and what are the key areas of biomedical engineering? Biomedical engineering is a
multidisciplinary field where biomedical engineers use concepts and methods from biology, medicine, physics, mathematics and engineering science to advance knowledge
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