Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The impact of these discoveries and many others was profound. The health care system
that consisted primarily of the “horse and buggy” physician was gone forever, replaced by
the doctor backed by and centered around the hospital, as medicine began to change to
accommodate the new technology.
Following World War II, the evolution of comprehensive care greatly accelerated. The
advanced technology that had been developed in the pursuit of military objectives now
became available for peaceful applications, with the medical profession benefiting greatly
from this rapid surge of technological “finds.” For instance, the realm of electronics came into
prominence. The techniques for following enemy ships and planes, as well as providing avia-
tors with information concerning altitude, air speed, and the like, were now used extensively
in medicine to follow the subtle electrical behavior of the fundamental unit of the central
nervous system—the neuron—or to monitor the beating heart of a patient.
The Second World War also brought a spark of innovation in the rehabilitation engineer-
ing and prosthetics fields. With advances in medical care technologies, more veterans were
returning home alive—and disabled. This increase in need, combined with a surge in new
materials development in the late 1940s, assisted the growth of assistive technologies
during the post-WWII era.
Science and technology have leapfrogged past each other throughout recorded history.
Anyone seeking a causal relation between the two was just as likely to find technology
the cause and science the effect, with the converse also holding true. As gunnery led to
ballistics and the steam engine transformed into thermodynamics, so did powered flight
lead to aerodynamics. However, with the advent of electronics this causal relation has
been reversed; scientific research is systematically exploited in the pursuit of technical
advancement.
Just as World War II sparked an advancement in comprehensive care, the 1960s enjoyed
a dramatic electronics revolution, compliments of the first lunar landing. What was consid-
ered science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s became reality. Devices continually changed to
incorporate the latest innovations, which in many cases became outmoded in a very short
period of time. Telemetry devices used to monitor the activity of a patient's heart freed both
the physician and the patient from the wires that previously restricted them to the four
walls of the hospital room. Computers, similar to those that controlled the flight plans of
the
capsules, now completely inundate our society.
Since the 1970s, medical researchers have put these electronic brains to work performing
complex calculations, keeping records (via artificial intelligence), and even controlling the
very instrumentation that sustains life. The development of new medical imaging tech-
niques such as computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
totally depended on a continually advancing computer technology. New imaging develop-
ments include functional MRI (Figure 1.5), a tool capable of illustrating active neural areas
by quantifying oxygen consumption and blood flow in the brain. The citations and techno-
logical discoveries are so myriad that it is impossible to mention them all.
“Spare parts” surgery is now routine. With the first successful transplantation of a
kidney in 1954, the concept of “artificial organs” gained acceptance and officially came
into vogue in the medical arena (Figure 1.6). Technology to provide prosthetic devices,
such as artificial heart valves and artificial blood vessels, developed. Even an artificial
heart program to develop a replacement for a defective or diseased human heart began.
Apollo
