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| Home : Volume 31 : Winter 2005 : | |
| From bench to bedside | |
From left to right: Students Lauren Hensley, Nina Lewis, Aman Ghotra, Erik Bieging, Evan Rogers and Joe Hippensteel worked with a university client to develop a transport cage support for nonhuman primates. |
| Student-industry design course projects are a win for everyone. |
While experienced biomedical engineers advance the field and enable their companies to produce new diagnostic tests and more effective medical treatments, the path to successful innovation may not always be smooth. Sometimes a fresh approach provides the key that unlocks a tough engineering problem. That's where UW-Madison biomedical engineering undergraduate students enter the picture. Last spring, Dan Lombardi, a senior fellow engineer with Viasys Healthcare/Nicolet Biomedical, worked with four of them to solve an elusive engineering puzzle. The company is a member of the UW Biomedical Engineering Student Design Consortium, which matches companies with BME undergraduates to create real-world biomedical engineering solutions.
The project in this case was designing a monitor to help doctors track epilepsy patients' movements to better assess and diagnose their seizure types.
Although it was Lombardi's first experience with the consortium, he had high expectations. "I anticipated an excellent outcome working with students in the UW Department of Biomedical Engineering," he says, "and right from the very beginning I was impressed with all four students on the team."
Before choosing a solution, the students determined the best way to track seizures. They studied several approaches, including radio frequency and optical techniques, and settled on ultrasound. Next, they developed and wrote specifications for the monitor. Under Lombardi's supervision, they demonstrated that it could map the patient's location in three dimensions by feeding those dimensions into a computer that converted them into coordinates a video camera could interpret. Now the company may move ahead with production, says Lombardi.
Faculty, staff, students, industry representatives and the public can view the students' designs each semester at the Biomedical Engineering Student Design Expo |
He commends the students for their commitment to the project and their display of engineering skills. As for Nicolet's participation in the consortium, Lombardi highly endorsed his company's decision to join. "I really enjoyed the students and found they gave me all of their time and effort," he says. "From my standpoint, it was just plain fun."
In addition to Nicolet Biomedical, other consortium members include Datex-Ohmeda, Madison; GE Healthcare, Waukesha; and American Medical Systems, Minneapolis. In forming this partnership, member companies agree to guide a team of students through the process of designing a medical device, a therapy or diagnostic tool of the company's interest. Members benefit from the students' fresh outlook and hard work to help advance their projects into prototypes, with the potential for further development, patenting and marketing. An added advantage, says BME Professor and Chair Rob Radwin, is that they gain an edge over competitors in the job market by identifying firsthand the top BME graduates.
The consortium creates valuable relationships between the students and companies — which really motivate the students, says Radwin. "This helps them to see how what they learn in the classroom relates to the real world, and they learn how to learn," he says. Many past projects have been very successful and have led to some unique, patentable designs, he says.
No other BME undergraduate program in the country includes coursework that provides real-world design projects every semester for every biomedical engineering student, says Radwin. "We wanted a biomedical engineering degree that was different," he says. "We wanted to create a program that would help ensure that there were jobs for our undergraduates."
In the design courses, "clients" also include UW Hospital clinicians or Medical School researchers. At the start of each semester, students choose projects, form teams, schedule meetings and plan brainstorming sessions. Then they spend long hours experimenting and designing their devices. The intensive process requires that teams meet regularly and file progress reports with their mentor or client company. At semester's end, the students' efforts culminate in a final presentation at the Biomedical Engineering Student Design Expo. Open to the public, the expo offers each team the opportunity to demonstrate and explain its project. Biomedical companies are invited and encouraged to attend the event, providing more interaction between the worlds of academe and industry.
This year, BME senior Andrew Wentland is leading a team of fellow seniors in what will be his final design project. His team pursued patents for two previous projects via the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Now his group is designing an accessible syringe dosing system for delivering automated medication doses in a reliable, low-cost and easy-to-use fashion. The project is part of the Biomedical Engineering National Student Design Competition.
Following graduation, he plans to earn a combined MD/PhD and continue studying biomedical engineering. He spent last summer at GE Healthcare working on computer software projects geared to help radiologists and medical technologists better analyze MRI images.
"Working in industry was a tremendous benefit to me," says Wentland. "My time at GE was epiphanic — working on biomedical engineering projects [for the BME design course] is remarkably congruent with how industry functions. I experienced no difference between industry and design projects, especially when it came to working on a team, meeting with the individuals you are designing the product for, and needing to learn that which you don't know."
Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu
Date last modified: Tuesday, 26-Apr-2005 17:06:42 CDT
Date created: 26-Apr-2005
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