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ECE414

ECE 414 (Biomedical Instrumentation) is a 3-credit hour course that satisfies the Technical Electives requirements for ECE majors. It is offered every Fall and Spring. This course is the same as BIOE414.

Content Covered

  • Engineering aspects of the detection, acquisition, processing, and display of signals from living systems.
  • Biomedical sensors for measurements of
  • biopotentials
  • ions and gases in aqueous solution
  • force, displacement, blood pressure, blood flow, heart sounds, respiration, and temperature.
  • Therapeutic and prosthetic devices as well as medical imaging instruments

Towards the end of the course, there is an overview for each of x-ray, nuclear, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound imaging.

Prerequisites

When to Take It

Students interested in bioengineering can take this class as soon as they are done with ECE210. This course is a good introduction for those interested in bioengineering, since it covers so many topics. This class borrows many analog signal processing techniques from 210 - students are expected to know how to analyze op-amp circuits, create low, band or high pass filters, and analyze circuits with capacitors and inductors in the frequency domain. The only prerequisite is ECE210, so students can take it as early as their sophomore year. It may also be a good idea to take the companion laboratory course -- ECE415 (Biomedical Instrumentation Lab).

Course Structure

The homework load for this course is relatively low compared to other classes. There are only 5 problem sets, including both problems written by instructor and problems from the book. Students are expected to use a graphing software to complete the graphing portions of the homework. Some questions are designed to take extra research time to find information that is not in the book, so it is not advisable to start the homework right before it is due.

There is no final for this course; however, there will be a group research project which will have the weight of a final where students are asked to review articles about a biomedical instrument they are interested in and write a report about it.

There are 3 midterms and, while they are pretty straight forward, they ask about lot of information not covered in the book. In order to do well on this course, attending lectures is recommended, since lectures thoroughly cover a lot of topics from the book.

Instructors

The course is taught by Professor Joseph Irudayaraj and occasionally co-taught by Professor Mia Sands.

Life After

After taking this course, students may choose to pursue further bioengineering-related studies; possible courses include ECE416 (Biosensors), which focuses more on cell-level sensing for proteins and pathogens, or imaging-related classes such as ECE380 (Biomedical Imaging), ECE472 (Ultrasound Imaging), or ECE480 (Magnetic Resonance Imaging).