Biomedical instruments are used to collect and analyse biological data. Recent advances in medical field have been fuelled by the instruments developed by the Electronics and Instrumentation Engineers. Pacemakers, Ultrasound Machine CAT, Medical diagnostic systems etc are a few examples. Now health care industry uses many instruments which are to be looked after by instrumentation engineers.The areas of research in this field are: The origins of biopotentials ,Biopotential electrodes, Differential amplifier design ,Coupling with the environment ,Isolation design techniques, Low-noise instrumentation etc. The different transducers for biomedical application are:
-Resistive transducers - Muscle force and Stress (Strain guge), Spirometry (Potentiont) , humidity, (Gamstrers), Respiration (Thermistor)
-Inductive Transducers - Flow measurements, muscle movement (LVDT)
-Capacitive Transducers - Heart sound measurement, Pulse pick up
-Photoelectric Transducers - Pulse transducers, Blood pressure, oxygen Analyses
-Chemcial Transducer - Ag-Agfallas (Electrodes, PH electrode
-Piezoelectric Transducers - Pulse pickup, ultrasonic blood flowmeter etc.
designing for best electrical performance and ensuring patient safety is a major challenge in this field.
MRI
It is a common form of biomedical instrumentation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive method used to render images of the inside of an object. It is primarily used in medical imaging to demonstrate pathological or other physiological alterations of living tissues.MRI is used to distinguish pathologic tissue (such as a brain tumour) from normal tissue.
for more details on MRI, visit:
http://vigyanprasar.govcomcom/feature69.htm