some years of experience in   Biological Fields

          Biological cells use bioelectricity to store metabolic energy, to do work or trigger internal changes, and to signal one another. Bioelectromagnetism is the electric current produced by action potentials along with the magnetic fields they generate through the phenomenon of electromagnetism. Bioelectromagnetism is studied primarily through the techniques of electrophysiology. In the late eighteenth century, the Italian physician and physicist Luigi Galvani first recorded the phenomenon while dissecting a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity. Galvani coined the term animal electricity to describe the phenomenon, while contemporaries labeled it galvanism. Galvani and contemporaries regarded muscle activation as resulting from an electrical fluid or substance in the nerves.

         Bioelectromagnetism is an aspect of all living things, including all plants and animals. Bioenergetics is the study of energy relationships of living organisms. Biodynamics deals with the energy utilization and the activities of organisms. Some animals have acute bioelectric sensors, and others, such as migratory birds, are believed to navigate in part by orienting with respect to the Earth's magnetic field. Also, sharks are more sensitive to local interaction in electromagnetic fields than most humans. Other animals, such as the electric eel, are able to generate large electric fields outside their bodies. In the life sciences, biomedical engineering uses concepts of circuit theory, molecular biology, pharmacology, and bioelectricity. Bioelectromagnetism is associated with biorhythms and chronobiology. Biofeedback is used in physiology and psychology to monitor rhythmic cycles of physical, mental, and emotional characteristics and as a technique for teaching the control of bioelectric functions. Bioelectromagnetism involves the interaction of ions. Bioelectromagnetism is sometimes difficult to understand because of the differing types of bioelectricity, such as brainwaves, myoelectricity (e.g., heart-muscle phenomena), and other related subdivisions of the same general bioelectromagnetic phenomena. One such phenomenon is a brainwave, which neurophysiology studies, where bioelectromagnetic fluctuations of voltage between parts of the cerebral cortex are detectable with an electroencephalograph. This is primarily studied in the brain by way of the electroencephalogram or "EEG."

        Bioelectromagnetism (sometimes equated with bioelectricity) refers to the electrical, magnetic or electromagnetic fields produced by living cells, tissues or organisms. Examples include the cell potential of cell membranes and the electric currents that flow in nerves and muscles, as a result of action potentials. It is not to be confused with bioelectromagnetics, which deals with the effect on life from external electromagnetism.

         

Biomedical Engineering Technicians

          Clinical engineering is a branch of biomedical engineering for professionals responsible for the management of medical equipment in a hospital. The tasks of a clinical engineer are typically the acquisition and management of medical device inventory, supervising biomedical engineering technicians (BMETs), ensuring that safety and regulatory issues are taken into consideration and serving as a technological consultant for any issues in a hospital where medical devices are concerned. Clinical engineers work closely with the IT department and medical physicists. Schematic representation of normal ECG trace showing sinus rhythm, an example of a biomedical engineering application of electronic engineering to electrophysiology and medical diagnosis.A typical biomedical engineering department does the corrective and preventive maintenance on the medical devices used by the hospital, except for those covered by a warranty or maintenance agreement with an external company.

          All newly acquired equipment is also fully tested. That is, every line of software is executed, or every possible setting is exercised and verified. Most devices are intentionally simplified in some way to make the testing process less expensive, yet accurate. Many biomedical devices need to be sterilized. This creates a unique set of problems, since most sterilization techniques can cause damage to machinery and materials. Most medical devices are either inherently safe, or have added devices and systems so that they can sense their failure and shut down into an unusable, thus very safe state. A typical, basic requirement is that no single failure should cause the therapy to become unsafe at any point during its life-cycle. See safety engineering for a discussion of the procedures used to design safe systems.

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Systems and integrative engineering

          Systems biology can be considered from a number of different aspects: Some sources discuss systems biology as a field of study, particularly, the study of the interactions between the components of biological systems, and how these interactions give rise to the function and behavior of that system (for example, the enzymes and metabolites in a metabolic pathway) Other sources consider systems biology as a paradigm, usually defined in antithesis to the so-called reductionist paradigm, although fully consistent with the scientific method.

The distinction between the two paradigms is referred to in these quotations: "The reductionist approach has successfully identified most of the components and many of the interactions but, unfortunately, offers no convincing concepts or methods to understand how system properties emerge...the pluralism of causes and effects in biological networks is better addressed by observing, through quantitiative measures, multiple components simultaneously and by rigorous data integration with mathematical models" Science "Systems biology...is about putting together rather than taking apart, integration rather than reduction. It requires that we develop ways of thinking about integration that are as rigorous as our reductionist programmes, but different....It means changing our philosophy,

 

Systems Biology finds its roots in quantitative modelling of enzyme kinetics, a discipline that flourished between 1900 and 1970, but also in the simulations developed to study neurophysiology, and the control theory, or cybernetics. One of the theorists who can be seen as a precursor of systems biology is Ludwig von Bertalanffy with his general systems theory. In 1952, the British neurophysiologists and nobel prize winners Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley constructed a mathematical model explaining the action potential propagating along the axon of a neuronal cell. In 1960, Denis Noble developed the first computer model of a beating heart. The 1960s and 1970s saw the development of several approaches to study complex molecular systems, such as the Metabolic Control Analysis and the biochemical systems theory. The successes of molecular biology throughout the 1980s, coupled with a skepticism toward theoretical biology, that then promised more than it achieved, caused the quantitative modelling of biological processes to become a somewhat minor field.

 

"Clinical engineering is a branch of biomedical engineering for professionals responsible for the management of medical equipment in a hospital. The tasks of a clinical engineer are typically the acquisition and management of medical device inventory, supervising biomedical engineering technicians (BMETs), ensuring that safety and regulatory issues are taken into consideration and serving as a technological consultant for any issues in a hospital where medical devices are concerned. Clinical engineers work closely with the IT department and medical physicists.