Biomedical Engineering Research Paper

Biomedical engineering is the use of engineering techniques applied to biology and the medical field. By doing so the advancement of the healthcare field is possible through higher quality instruments, viable transplants, and understanding of the human body. In the biomedical engineering field there are many sub disciplines such as surgical instruments and medical technology, tissue engineering, biomaterials, and biomechanics.
The discipline of surgical instruments and medical technology focuses on making surgical instruments of higher quality, cost effective and ensuring greater performance in the operating room. The creation of better surgical instruments aids with patient healing and better outcomes. Organs and other vital parts of the body can be handled with care with less possibility of damage. Instruments are created using CAD to produce 3-D images biomedical engineers can then create through machinery and technologies available to them. The instruments can then be prototyped and tested quickly to be available to healthcare providers. Overall, creating a safer,
more careful approach to treating those in need of surgeries.
Tissue engineering also known as regenerative medicine focuses on the use of cells and with engineering principles to enhance or replicate biological processes.
The purpose of this area of biomedical engineering is to focus on helping to revitalize and to repair organ function. An important technique is scaffolding which is when a group of cells are grown together for a specific function such as a specific organ cell group. In order to help these groups of cell grow, growth factors can be introduced to potentially speed up the process and generate healthy cells ready from transplant. Scaffolding has led to the growth of lung, liver and cardiac tissues to repair organs or generate new ones altogether. Structural tissues can also be grown and transplanted such as cartilage or bone. Another commonly known technique used is stems cells which can be genetically altered to repair various chronic
ailments.
Biomaterials is the use of natural and synthetic materials to interact with human tissues to promote health and healing. The areas of healthcare that is focused on in this discipline are medical implants, human tissue healing, drug delivery, and molecular probes. Medical implants that have been produced at the hand of biomaterials are stents, grafts, valves, and joints including ligaments and nerves. Tissue healing has been aided through the use of better, more comprehensive sutures and staples that have been developed to have the ability to dissolve. The practice of drug delivery has helped to more efficiently target where the medicine is needed such as in cancer patients to target their tumors. Molecular probes have improved medical imaging at the molecular level for practical applications as in cancers or other abnormal growths within the body.
Biomechanics utilizes more of a mechanical engineering aspect applied with biology and biological systems. Commonly this area of biomedical engineering is applied to sports medicine and furthering those applications. Physics is a vital skill to analyzing the human body in relation to biomechanics. Essential knowledge associated with this discipline is kinetics and kinematics. Kinetics analyzes forces on the body as it is in motion while kinematics is without forces acting upon the body. Biomechanics have to understand the way in which joints, muscles, and bone respond to one another to be able to develop technologies to treat injuries of these systems. These engineers develop ways to rehabilitate patients who have encountered trauma in regards to motion who are commonly athletes. The extensive knowledge of biomechanics allows them to evaluate the way athletes move in their respective sports. When athletes tear ligaments or tendons engineers can repair them based on their background of movement of the human body.