Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Higher education in Europe can be divided into before and after the Bologna Declaration, the most revolutionary process in modern education. Biomedical engineering, an emerging “subject” during the last 40 years, strongly interdisciplinary, fragmented and lacking of international coordination, may benefit from this harmonization process. An early initiative such as BIOMEDEA has made a contribution through proposing biomedical engineering foundations for building a common curriculum among higher education institutions. A common curriculum would presumably contribute to student and teacher mobility, certification and accreditation and as a consequence promote increased international employability. The virtual campus action extends or adds values to already existing educational exchange networks such as Erasmus, important in student mobility and educational harmonization and recognition. A virtual education dimension is added to European co-operation, encouraged through the development of new organisational models for European institutions, promoting virtual mobility and recognition. Virtual campuses may have a possibility to bridge the gaps in national BME curricula all with respect to the action towards a consensus on European guidelines for the harmonization. The evaluation of the e-curricula is conformant with the roadmap of BME courses as defined by BIOMEDEA. Most courses are classified as second cycle courses on a Master level, supporting that studies in BME could be a continuation from cycle one. Learning environment and the students learning outcome, points towards a strong teacher-centred approach to learning. The transparency at all levels are low, a factor that might influence recruiting potential students to a programme, especially those students with working experience and an international background. To fulfil the Bologna Declaration and other steering documents for the higher education in an expanding European future there are still tasks to be solved regarding recognition, legalisation, pedagogical issues and employability looking for a harmonized solution.

Learning management system has an important role in web-based education. Mediamaisteri Group is an expert company in web-based solutions for e-learning and provides the platform for EVICAB (European Virtual Campus for Biomedical Engineering) project. In the project the openness and free availability has been the fundamental ideas since the beginning. Moodle learning management system supports the idea. Moodle is an open source platform. Leaning management system has been modified for providing the needed tools for virtual campus project.

Realization of new surgical treatment in the 21st century, it is necessary to use various advanced technologies; surgical robots, three-dimensional medical images, computer graphics, computer simulation technology and others. Three-dimensional medical image for surgical operation provides surgeons with advanced vision. A surgical robot provides surgeons with advanced hand, but it is not a machine to do the same action of a surgeon using scissors or a scalpel. The advanced vision and hands available to surgeons are creating new surgical fields, which are minimally invasive surgery, noninvasive surgery, virtual reality microsurgery, tele-surgery, fetus surgery, neuro-informatics surgery and others in the 21st century.

Fluorescence offers many opportunities for optical molecular imaging and can provide information beyond simply the localisation of fluorescent labels. At Imperial we are developing technology to analyse and image fluorescence radiation with respect to wavelength, polarisation and, particularly, fluorescence lifetime, in order to maximise the information content. This talk will review our recent progress applying fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) and multidimensional fluorescence imaging (MDFI) to tissue imaging and in vitro cell microscopy. Applying FLIM to autofluorescence of biological tissue can provide label-free contrast for non-invasive diagnostic imaging, as we have demonstrated in various tissues including atherosclerotic plaques, cartilage, pancreas and cervical tissue. FLIM and MDFI are also applicable to image intracellular structure and function for cell biology and drug discovery: hyperspectral imaging and FLIM can provide (quantitative) information concerning the local fluorophore environment and facilitate robust fluorescence resonant energy transfer (FRET) experiments while information concerning structure and rotational mobility may be obtained by applying polarisation resolution. Our most recent work includes high-speed and optically-sectioned FLIM for automated imaging and live cell studies, hyperspectral FLIM for acquiring excitation-emission –lifetime matrices to distinguish different fluorophores and microenvironments and imaging of rotational correlation time, particularly applied to microfluidic devices. Excitation sources are a particular challenge for confocal microscopy and other FLIM modalities including endoscopy, owing to the complexity and limited spectral coverage of available technology. Increasingly we are exploiting ultrafast fibre lasers and continuously tunable ultrafast sources based on continuum generation in photonic crystal fibres for wide-field and confocal FLIM applications.

In this presentation I will discuss the recent development of nanomedicine as an emerging field in the United States. In particular, I will give a brief summary of the US National Institute of Health (NIH) nanotechnology / nanomedicine centers established over the last few years, and present the bionanotechnologies being developed at the NIH nanomedicine centers at Georgia Tech and Emory University. The opportunities and challenges in developing nanomedince will be discussed.

The Physiome Project comprises a worldwide effort to provide a computational framework for understanding human and other eukaryotic physiology. The aim is to develop integrative models at all levels of biological organization from genes to the whole organism. This is achieved via gene regulatory networks, protein pathways, integrative cell function, and tissue and whole organ structure/function relations. A key hallmark of the Physiome is that it covers many physical scales of description, from molecule-molecule interactions to whole cell behaviour to whole organ descriptions. This talk will stress the computational and semantic layers of the Physiome, the mathematical and logical “glue” that allows the various physiological scales to communicate and work with one another. The first knowledge domain is Ontologies. Ontology is a specific expression of known facts about the real world. Work on ontologies is being undertaken in order to organize biological data and knowledge at the different levels of the biological continuum. An additional and important component of this work is to facilitate easy and effective access to a range of databases, and to facilitate automated reasoning that can simultaneously extract information from many databases.

Synthetic Biology is an emerging field that aims to design and manufacture biologically-based devices and systems that do not already exist in the natural world, including the re-design and fabrication of existing biological systems. The foundations of Synthetic Biology are based on the increasing availability of complete genetic information for many organisms, including humans, and the ability to manipulate this information in living organisms to produce novel outcomes. More specifically, engineering principles, including systems and signal theory, are used to define biological systems in terms of functional modules - creating an inventory of ‘bioparts’ whose function is expressed in terms of accurate input/output characteristics. These ‘bioparts’ can then be reassembled into novel devices - acting as components for new systems in future applications. Systems Biology aims to study natural biological systems as a whole, often with a biomedical focus, and uses simulation and modeling tools in comparisons with experimental information.

The medical device industry, defined here as implanted therapeutic or restorative technologies, is roughly 50 years old. The first commercially available cardiac pacemaker to treat complete heart block was implanted in 1958 in Sweden followed by the first ball and cage prosthetic heart valve in 1960. From these tentative beginnings, medical device industry sales by U.S. companies were estimated to be $77 billion in 2003. Significant technology sectors now include mechanical and tissue prosthetic heart valves, cardiac pacemakers, implanted cardioverter-defibrillators to convert chaotic heart rhythms, cardiac re-synchronization devices to manage heart failure, vascular stents to treat occluded coronary and peripheral arteries, neurostimulation devices for certain central nervous system disorders, artificial joints and spinal implants for degenerative conditions, intraocular implants for cataracts, to cite representative examples. While financial metrics provide an indication of the direct economic impact of medical devices, a more relevant measure is the effect medical technologies have on reduction in patient morbidity and mortality, improved well-being, and increased quality of life.