Feature

Manar Din Samad

Traditionally, we have two top priority career choices in Bangladesh that is either engineering or medical science. Students of the subcontinent have always showed their interest towards computer science, possibly to keep up with the booming IT market and software industries. Whenever any course is in vogue, it becomes difficult for the juvenile learners to choose between disciplines. Eventually, they make sort of a desultory decision to enroll in undergraduate discipline. Most often they are forced by their parents to be a doctor rather than pursue his or her own field of interest. Not being able to cope with the tiring medical studies, many students are reported to have switched to engineering school giving a year loss or so.

We have a prejudice that engineering and medical are two conflicting streams where the doctors have nothing to do with the engineers and the vice versa. When I talk about merging these two apparently opposite fields into one unified discipline, my students cast a surprise gape and query. I assure them that this is not the 'bio-engineering' that incorporates the popular 'genetic engineering' which is purely biological. It is about assisting the physicians primarily in their diagnostic and therapeutic activities through the knowledge and innovation of physical science and technology. For a simple example, we are all familiar with CT (Computed tomography) scanner, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), ECG (Electrocardiography), ultrasonography, and less possibly with EEG (Electroencephalography), EMG (Electromyography) and so on. Many of us know about cardiac pacemakers, defibrillators, cochlear implant for hearing aid, microwave, shortwave and laser therapy and lot more. Without these tools, it is impossible for any doctor to provide with some crucial reports and services necessary for proper treatment of patients. However, without any deterministic technical assistance, prescribing on the basis of mere speculation may lead to misdiagnosis. The case is obviously more severe about fatal diseases like cancer.

Now, who are the people behind these medical machines? They are the biomedical engineers. In most renowned universities across the globe, biomedical engineering is taught even at undergraduate level under a separate department where the faculties of engineering and medicine & surgery jointly work in research groups. The Johns Hopkins University in USA is called the pioneer of BME research and study. BME program basically concentrates on four broad categories: Biomedical signal & Image processing, Biomechanics, Biomedical measurement & Instrumentation and Biomedical materials. Some more branches like neural engineering, bio-photonics, medical prosthesis, rehabilitation and brain computer interface are emerging from those. Other than medical service research, these are allowing the physical image or interpretation of biological processes which are being used in devising artifacts and artificial sensory aids. Medical and biological sciences have always been imbued with open scopes for research findings in contrast to human built concrete physical sciences.

BME is found to be a very flexible program worldwide for prospective graduate students coming from varied undergraduate backgrounds like zoology, botany, medicine, physics, mathematics, computer science, biochemistry, and engineering preferably electrical and mechanical. As a compensatory means, selected graduate students are to take some prerequisite courses, which were not related to their undergrad school. Moreover, worldwide research funding for BME is more than any engineering discipline. Math lovers seek for engineering education and they are seen to have denigrating views on biological science. Therefore, almost no students from engineering background show attention to this field differing from mainstream engineering education. Bangladesh does not possess the least favorable climate for BME the way it does for genetic engineering which has a separate department at DU. Both medical and engineering students are kept in the dark regarding BME program and having constricted vision would never let us know the prospect, excitement and demand of this field whose regime is very likely to take over this century.

(Lecturer, EEE, UIU, Dhaka
Alumnus, EEE, BUET
manards@uiu.ac.bd)