The biomedical engineering is the result of applying the principles and techniques of engineering to the field of medicine. It is principally involved in the design and construction of medical devices and health technologies such as medical equipment, prosthetics, medical devices, diagnostic devices (medical imaging) and therapy.

It also involved in the management or administration of technical resources related to a system of hospitals. It combines engineering expertise with medical needs to make profit in the care of health. The cultivation of tissues, as well as the production of certain drugs, usually considered part of bioengineering.

Areas of Knowledge

Biomedical engineering is widely recognized as a multidisciplinary field, resulting from a broad spectrum of disciplines that influence from various fields and sources of information. Because of their extreme diversity, it is strange that the bioengineering focus on one aspect in particular. There are too many breakdowns of the engineering disciplines, often unfold in:

• ·         Biomagnetism And Techniques Brain
• ·         Optical Imaging And Biomedical
• ·         Biomaterials
• ·         Biomechanics And Biotransport
• ·         Medical Instrumentation
• ·         Engineering, Molecular And Cellular
• ·         Systems Biology

In other cases, disciplines within the biongenieria fall into proximity with other engineering fields, more established which typically include:

• ·         Chemical engineering – often associated with engineering, biochemistry, cellular, molecular, new materials and fabrics, and so on.
• ·         Clinical engineering – often associated with engineering, medical engineering or hospital , administration and maintenance of medical equipment in a clinic or hospital.
• ·         Electronic engineering – often associated with bioelectricity, bioinstrumentation, imaging, and medical instrumentation.
• ·         Mechanical engineering – often associated with biomechanics, biotransport and modeling of biological systems.

Optics and optical engineering include medical imaging, imaging and instrumentation.

Fields Of Action

In the beginning, this discipline was linked mainly to the technical application of engineering electrical and electronic products for the construction of medical devices (medical instrumentation), and the design of prosthetics and orthotics (biomechanical and rehabilitation). Subsequently, a very important part of engineering applications to medicine was instrumentation for imaging the human body (medical imaging).

Since the development of computers, the importance of instrumentation was decreasing while the processing of acquired signals gained further momentum because it was possible to obtain additional information from the instrumentation signals provided, and that was not visible directly from the pure lines (biomedical signal processing). Today the discipline is linked to other such as genomics and proteomics (computational biology). Today there are specialties in clinical engineering.

Some authors indicate that there is biomedical engineering since the remedies applied to particular problems of the individual as a prosthetic toe was discovered in a tomb Egyptian with a length of more than 3000 years. Other authors mention the anatomical drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci and approaches to lever arms or the work of Luigi Galvani and Lord Kelvin on the electrical conduction in the living. However, the development of electric and electronic instrumentation was an explosion of results and can be considered as one of the closest sources of biomedical engineering. This is mainly between the years 1890 and 1930.

Examples include designs for recording electrophysiological signals, beginning with records of AD Waller in human hearts (1887), refinement of the technique by W. Developing a Einthoven string galvanometer (1901) and the application of the registration of EEG signals in humans by Berger (1924). Electronic instrumentation from vacuum tubes was used for E. Lovett Garceau to amplify these electrical signals and the first set of commercial three-channel EEG was built by Alfred Grass in 1935. Another example is the development of imaging instrumentation.

The discovery of X-rays by Rontgen in 1895 and its first application in biomedicine spent a week. Since 1896, Siemens and General Electric already sell these systems. Currently, new developments in imaging have taken much longer to achieve its clinical application. The principle of magnetic resonance was discovered in 1946, but it was not until 30 years later, that may have developed a system for use in humans.