What is BME 201 at UW-Madison?
April 2024
By Mahathi Karthikeyan
Edited by Harvey Chen
This is a uniquely designed class called “Introduction to Biomedical Engineering Design and Fundamentals.” It is required for all students listed as Biomedical Engineering Majors and is usually taken in the spring semester during a student’s second year. It was recently created as a request from students to learn more about the skills that will make them successful in the field of engineering. A project is given to each student where they use the knowledge that is taught in the labs and lectures. This course is also important for certain students to pick their track in biomedical engineering such as bioinstrumentation (electronics), biomaterials and cell engineering, biomechanics, and imaging.
Some of the important skills that are taught in this class include circuits and microcontrollers, methods to fabricate materials, SolidWorks, and MATLAB. Besides the technical skills, other important engineering background knowledge such as codes, standards, and documentation of work through lab notebooks is also a major aspect of the schedule.
In addition to the skills and knowledge mentioned above, reports and product design specifications for the project are also necessary to showcase the research and work done – an extremely useful skill that will be taken advantage of in many ways in this industry.
To specifically run through an example of a project from this year, the students were tasked to create a material that would mimic bone material as a potential treatment for bone cysts. This “material” will be held in a bioreactor under physiological conditions that work like the human body. This includes the bioreactor vessel being temperature-controlled, which will be detected by a thermistor and a heating element that is turned on when the temperature is below 36°C and turned off when the temperature is above 45°C. The temperature of the bioreactor will be displayed on the serial monitor which is controlled by a microcontroller. The serial monitor and the switch that operates the heating element are written with Arduino code. It is the first skill that was taught to students and it was used to create the intricate electronic component that is vital to keep the bioreactor vessel under temperature control.
Students were also responsible for creating a sample holder which was modeled using a software program called SolidWorks. The sample holder for the material will be fabricated along with the material used for the bone graft itself. The bone graft material is decided through research and will be placed in the bioreactor after it is fabricated. Eventually, mechanical testing of the material will be conducted to test the properties, and the data will be modeled through MATLAB (programming platform designed to analyze and engineer systems).
Overall, numerous valuable skills and codes for conduct are taught throughout the project in BME 201. All of the aspects of creating the device and documenting research and progress are extremely handy and will be utilized in real-world manufacturing applications.
Works Cited
Graham, J. D. (n.d.). Biomedical Engineering - College of Engineering - UW-Madison. College of Engineering - University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved April 10, 2024, from https://engineering.wisc.edu/departments/biomedical-engineering/
Biomedical Engineering (B M E) < University of Wisconsin-Madison. (n.d.). Guide.wisc.edu. Retrieved April 10, 2024, from https://guide.wisc.edu/courses/b_m_e/
Zhang, X.-Y. . (2015). Biomedical engineering for health research and development. European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences, 19(2), 220–224. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25683934/
