By Terence Leung

This was the challenge we set for our 1^st year biomedical engineering students over the first five weeks of the first term. Welcome to the ENGS101P Engineering Challenge! They were given a (hypothetical) budget of 5 million yuan (~£583K) to design a cancer diagnostic system for the rural area of Yunnan, a mountainous region in China with annual disposable income only a third of those living in the urban areas.

To help them decide, we gave them a talk on the cancer crisis in China, and two introductory lectures on breast and prostate cancer therapy and imaging. We also organised visits to five research labs at UCL, including X-ray Imaging Lab, Photoacoustic Imaging Lab, Diffuse Optical Imaging Lab, Ultrasound Imaging Lab at the Centre for Medical Image Computing, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Lab at the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging.

You can see what solutions they came up with in these Youtube videos.

Professor Gary Royle (UCL Professor of Medical Radiation Physics and Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University) talked about cancer crisis in China

Dr Paul Doolan, a radiotherapy and proton physicist at University College London Hospital, gave an introduction to breast and prostate cancer therapy

Miss Savanna Chung, a practising radiotherapist and PhD student in radiotherapy, gave an introduction to breast and prostate cancer imaging

Team “China Heroes” visiting Photoacoustic Imaging Lab (Host: Trung)

Team “Cancer Club” visiting Diffuse Optical Imaging Lab (Hosts: Luke and Prash)

Team “CRABTech” visiting X-Ray lab (Host: Rob)

Team “Panda Cure” visiting Ultrasound Imaging Lab at the Centre for Medical Image Computing (Hosts: Yipeng and Ester)

Teams “MADLAB” and “CRABTech” visiting Magnetic Resonance Imaging Lab at the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (Hosts: Morium and Ian)

One of our outstanding second year biomedical engineering students, Marina Melero, has returned from a visit to Kualar Lumpur. She had been invited to a meeting of the Global Entrepreneurship Community to lead a workshop on healthcare.

In her blog post, she reports on her visit and gives her thoughts on the future of technology.

By Julian Henty

Clinical Engineering knowledge and skills were put to the test recently during a visit to UCLH’s Learning Hospital. Second year Biomedical Engineering students were given the chance to test various medical devices, such as ventilators, bedside monitors and suction machines, examine the workings of an in-house automated blood pressure machine, and observe vital signs measurement from a real ‘patient’ using a virtual bedside monitor.

Despite making good use of the department’s electronics lab for experimentation with transducers, software driven data acquisition, and aspects of electrical safety, the Clinical Engineering module fulfills its practical aims by providing a hands-on session with real hospital equipment and actual clinical measurements in a realistic clinical environment. The Learning Hospital has a ‘theatre’, complete with operating table and appropriate medical devices, and a ‘ward’ with two beds, nurses’ station and a medical gas supply.

The virtual non-invasive blood pressure (NIBP) device comprised a PC, control board and recycled components from a disassembled standard NIBP device. LabVIEW software measured the photoplethysmogram (PPG) amplitude distal to the cuff during inflation/deflation, which provided feedback to control the air pump and release valve. The software had an illustrative screen showing each step in the process of taking a real measurement. Safety aspects of NIBP measurement could also be demonstrated.

The patient waits anxiously for his results

The virtual bedside monitor displayed real-time graphs of the ECG, PPG, NIBP and chest movement while the ‘patient’ lay on a bed. LabVIEW software demonstrated how heart rate may be extracted from the ECG, PPG, or NIBP measurements, and respiratory rate from the ECG or chest movement. The software could also manipulate the ECG to demonstrate both noise and other lead measurements, and simulation of low amplitude due to pericardial/pleural effusion, pneumothorax, obesity or loss of viable myocardium.

With thanks to Dimitros Airantiz, Billy Dennis and Paul Burke