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President Clinton's health reforms could damage medical research and medical training, said speakers at an American conference sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences last month. Only 3% of the total spending on the health system goes on research and development, said Dr Rodney W Nichols from the New York Academy of Sciences. “If you think excellent biomedical education and research are expensive try ignorance and disease,” he commented. Professor Henry Greenberg, associate professor of cardiology at Columbia University's college of physicians and …

At the Center for Biomedical Education at the City University of New York, nutrition is integrated into the chemistry-biochemistry sequence of a six-year B.S.-M.D. program. Students perform an actual analysis of a sample of their own food, learning a number of basic techniques and concepts. At the same time they carry on experiments with rats on diets similar to those used by some people. Those activities are complemented by a dietary survey on themselves and other college students. The fundamentals of nutrition are taught as part of the biochemistry course, while the interpretation of the nutrition survey will be conducted in the course titled Health, Medicine and Society, in which students become acquainted with health problems in the community they will serve as general practitioners.

Educational uses of microcomputers are of growing importance in the biomedical sciences as well as in biology. This editorial discusses some of the special aspects related to the teaching in medical, dental, veterinary, and other health-related professional schools. These applications could have future impact upon other biological education. This article also offers an optimistic prophesy. Biomedical faculty who acquire personal computers for word processing and research applications will begin to appreciate the computational power of these machines. Computers can deduce the consequences of explicitly-stated hypotheses. My projection is that familiarity with logic-based tools will encourage the practice of logical deduction, and so eventually elevate the level of rigor in biology.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the microcomputer in biomedical education. Microcomputers are compact stand-alone computers, which came into being in the mid 1970's with the introduction of microprocessor chips. These combined all of the components of a computer's central processor unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit chip. When dealing with large numbers of students, the computer can help in the administration in various ways from selecting questions at random from a bank to printing lists of marks or grades. There is nothing, especially new about this in the field of biomedical education. Most of the things described have been done on mainframe computers for years. The coming of the microcomputer simply means easier access of students to computers and such things as portability. In microcomputer simulations, it is advantageous and a relatively simple matter to produce images-graphs and charts, ‘pictures' of chromatography columns, or of protein models, and so forth. These can be manipulated to some extent; for example, graphs can be altered, models can move or change color, so that the program can be interactive. It has been exercising the minds of a number of individuals how such programs could be combined with real images, either still or moving.

This paper discusses the mixed scientific and philosophical character of the origins issue, the ways it challenges a student's philosophy, and ways the biomedical educator may use the origins issue constructively.

I feel like a strange interloper in these proceedings. Most other conference participants are either educators with long practical experience in training minority students in the sciences and medicine or social scientists who have studied the attendant problems for years. By contrast, I am an historian, an historian of science and medicine more specifically, and I am very new to the business of medical education. Although I have been the assistant director of the Center for Biomedical Education (CBE) at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY) for a little over two and a half years and in that capacity have performed many functions, I serve primarily to represent the social sciences and humanities in the center’s unusual educational curriculum and to embody what might be called a societal or ethical perspective.

Support for gerontological education and research is analyzed from 1976 through 1986 for five federal agencies: the Administration on Aging, the Bureau of Health Professions, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Veterans Administration. It was determined that total federal allocations varied greatly between the social/behavioral and biomedical components of the aging field, with biomedical education and research receiving an increasingly larger percentage of support.

Within the medical specialties compartmentalized in named departments, there are "core areas" which need to be taught and within which experience by practice is necessary for adequate mastery, no matter whether the product mounts the academic ladder or contentedly exists as a dispenser of services in city or county, singly or in groups. There is, however, another core area which is basic for the education of all graduate students no matter what the specialty or what apparent career goals may be favored at the moment. This is a knowledge of the health-illness system which cannot be fractured since it denotes a process in continuity over time, ie, life.

Two US Army pilot studies have shown that teledentistry can save patient travel and evacuations. As a result, the Army is beginning a large research project to determine the benefits and the costs involved in using telemedicine equipment to provide remote dental diagnosis and treatment. This study will measure the costs and benefits in the areas of dental consulting, referrals for care, home call, telementoring, dentist laboratory communications, continuing education, and group management. lt is expected that this study will provide sufficient data to construct a business case for the implementation of this technology throughout the entire Army.

In this paper, we present the architecture of a Web-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for distant education of nursing students in fundamental aspects of the most common medical equipment. It offers course units covering the needs of users with different knowledge levels and characteristics. It tailors the presentation of the educational material to the users' diverse needs by using AI techniques to specify each user's model as well as to make pedagogical decisions. This is achieved via an expert system that uses a hybrid knowledge representation formalism integrating symbolic rules with neurocomputing.

It has been previously argued that science and engineering undergraduate students can benefit greatly from learning the history of their discipline. In order to successfully enhance learning by introducing history into undergraduate curriculum, it would be desirable to assess what the current educational uses of history are and to understand the needs and perceptions of teachers. Nevertheless, to our knowledge no quantitative study of the role of the history of science, engineering, and technology in the classroom has been so far conducted. In this paper we present the design of a survey aimed at assessing the current perception of teachers towards using the history of biomedical engineering (HBME) to enhance learning. This survey was part of a broader project originally led by the EMBS History Committee aimed at evaluating the educational value of the HBME, both for future biomedical engineers and for the broader public. The main goals of the survey are (1) to find out the current uses of the HBME in the classroom, and (2) to identify possible obstacles to expanding the HBME in the classroom.

The Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa (UAMI) has a biomedical engineering academic program with a track in clinical engineering. The clinical engineering students must initiate a project linked to the healthcare environment as one of the requirements to conclude the academic program. The objective of this work is to show the teaching-learning strategies used in the relationship between the student and the healthcare institution and in the development of the project. This paper reports the results obtained with two clinical engineering student pilot groups by evaluating the kind of project and its impact inside the healthcare institution where it was made as well as its diffusion in academic conferences and the alumni work force incorporation.

Glucose-insulin interactions in healthy and insulin-dependent diabetic humans are simulated using an overall and a detailed model based on pharmacokinetic diagrams of insulin and glucose. Both models are capable of predicting blood glucose and insulin levels, total glucose uptake and renal glucose excretion. The simulator is integrated with a graphical user interface to provide a user-friendly environment for performing virtual experiments with various characteristics, diet and exercise conditions.

An educational software (GLUCOSIM) is developed for illustrating the dynamics of blood glucose and insulin levels in Type I diabetes patients. This work extends the use or GLUCOSIM to closed-loop control of blood glucose levels with the use of an implantable glucose sensor and an insulin infusion pump. Various control strategies are applied to maintain blood glucose concentration close to natural values (Euglycemia) in Type I diabetic patients.

GLUCOSIM is an educational software package that simulates blood glucose and insulin dynamics in healthy individuals and patients with type 1 diabetes. It is being used to assist biomedical and chemical engineering students in visualizing the dynamic variations in blood glucose concentration in response to external variations such as food consumption and insulin administration. A nutritional database has been integrated to GLUCOSIM to provide meal inputs to the simulation. The simulator has been improved by the modification of mathematical models, and it has been adapted to include currently available commercial insulin brands.

Total hip replacement has become commonplace in the United States and elsewhere as the musculoskeletal system is unable to keep up with an individual's increased activity and life span. In the United States alone 120,000 hip replacements are carried out each year out of which 8-9% fail after surgery and the remaining last between 10 to 12 years. Biomedical engineers are, therefore, in particular demand to analyze current problems, and to design and evaluate new and innovative hip implant designs. In this report, a hands-on approach to biomechanics education in the area of total hip arthroplasty and its evaluation by students is described.

Education on medical physics and biomedical engineering has a long tradition in Poland, where the first academic course of medical engineering in the world started in 1946. Our students have several occasions to learn about tradition of the Radium Institute in Warsaw and the role played by Madame Curie, who was admired also for her ethical approach to science. The paper focuses on two "hot" ethical points of student seminars and discussions - a conflict of social needs with economy and ethical problems of radiation protection.

This paper presents the final version of a prototype multimedia application for training women on performing breast self examination (BSE) in the right way. The application was developed for the purposes of an evaluation study on the effectiveness of three different BSE training media: leaflets, videos and multimedia applications. Since the British National Health Service (NHS) does not offer BSE training at the moment in the form of a multimedia application, a prototype had to be developed and compared against the existing material of leaflets and videos. The paper presents a novel video playback approach, the main differences between the BSE multimedia application and other traditional training approaches already in use by the NHS at the moment, the benefits of using multimedia in biomedical training and education and the final applications structure along with the evaluation criteria for the applications effectiveness and the comparison methodology that will be used to compare its effectiveness against leaflets and videos.

A joint curriculum to deliver cooperating MSc biomedical engineering and physics courses by Baltic Universities was developed in the European TEMPUS S-JEP-12402-97 project framework.

A simulation package is developed for the glucose-insulin interaction in insulin-dependent diabetic patients. The simulator may be used to perform virtual experiments with various characteristics, diet and exercise conditions.

This paper deals with a new mechanical birth simulator (BirthSIM). Currently available birth simulators provide manikins that include new-born head and maternal pelvis but they do not produce the movements of the new-born in the mother's pelvis. Furthermore available maternal pelvis do not include interface pressure and are not enough realistic to simulate maternal pelvic muscles. In summary, these simulators do not help students to practice the gestures they should safely use to help the new-born in normal and at-risk situations of delivery. The originality of our mechanical birth simulator, is to provide a system to mimic the last step of the instrumental delivery, to insure a safe training of junior obstetricians and to test new techniques in obstetrics practice. The new mechanical birth simulator is composed of three parts: a physical new-born head and a maternal pelvis manikin, an interface pressure system, and a pneumatic actuator that develops an active resistance. Driven by a computer, the simulator can simulate the contractions, the interface pressure applied in the new-born head and mimic birth complications.

When choosing a career in scientific fields, girls tend to gravitate towards professions that help humanity; thus, the fields of health and medicine are widely chosen by women. To attract young women to engineering careers, girls need to be shown that engineering is used to improve the quality of people's lives. Biomedical engineering applies engineering principles to further medical research via basic research to understand how the human body operates or through collaboration with clinicians to facilitate the diagnosis and/or cure of diseases. NJIT Center for Pre-college Programs offer the Women In Engineering & Technology (WEIT)-FEMME program to encourage pre-college female students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. In 2001, Biomedical Engineering FEMME became the newest addition to the WIET Initiative specifically geared towards girls completing the eighth grade. The academic curriculum Integrates engineering principles with biomedical science, and Introduces girls to the role of engineers as "problem-solvers and helpers".

This paper discusses the development of a prototype multimedia application for training women to perform Breast Self Examination (BSE) correctly. The paper presents the main differences between the BSE multimedia application and the other, traditional training approaches currently in use by the UK National Health Service (NHS) at the moment. The benefits of using multimedia in biomedical training and education are discussed. An overview of the applications structure and design is presented along with the evaluation criteria for the applications effectiveness.

The requirements for engineers/physicists and the need for specialists in small countries causes differences in educational programmes and problems with accreditation. These problems are discussed for the example of Estonia. The structure of biomedical engineering and medical physics education and possibilities of professional accreditation as a chartered engineer or a euro-engineer in this area are reported. The Estonian society for Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics is the main body providing accreditation of specialists.

Increasing attention is being paid to clinical drug trials of late, in part because of renewed worry about adverse effects of medication and because of a general subscription to ethical considerations that seem to have been present in a much more abridged form in the past. A second edition of a popular American text recently appeared, and the massive Clinical Epidemiology of Alvan Feinstein also addressed such questions and their interpretations. Now we have a translation of a French book, seemingly sponsored without commercial considerations pertaining to any specific compound by a pharmaceutical company, Hoechst AG. Louis Lasagna has written the preface (one of the major misspellings in the book is the name of his institution, the Sackler, not Sacker, School of Biomedical Education of Tufts University). This short volume is an excellent guide for those who must design clinical drug trials and those who either conduct them or read