Page 19 - Biomedical Engineering and Design Handbook Volume 1, Fundamentals

xviii PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

body. They are involved in all phases of healthcare—measurement and diagnosis, therapy and repair,
and patient management and rehabilitation. While the work that biomedical engineers do involves the
human body, their work is engineering work. Biomedical engineers, like other engineers in the more
traditional disciplines, design, develop, make, and manage. Some work in traditional engineering
settings—in laboratories, design departments, on the floors of manufacturing plants—while others
deal directly with healthcare clients or are responsible for facilities in hospitals or clinics.
Of course, the field of biomedical engineering is not the sole province of practitioners and edu-
cators who call themselves biomedical engineers. The field includes people who call themselves
mechanical engineers, materials engineers, electrical engineers, optical engineers, or medical physi-
cists, among other names. The entire range of subjects that can be included in biomedical engineer-
ing is very broad. Some curricula offer two main tracks: biomechanics and bioinstrumentation. To
some degree, then, there is always a need in any publication dealing with the full scope of biomed-
ical engineering to bridge gaps, whether actually existing or merely perceived, such as the gap
between the application of mechanical engineering knowledge, skills, and principles from concep-
tion to the design, development, analysis, and operation of biomechanical systems and the applica-
tion of electrical engineering knowledge, skills, and principles to biosensors and bioinstrumentation.
The focus in the Standard Handbook of Biomedical Engineering and Design is on engineering
design informed by description in engineering language and methodology. For example, the Handbook
not only provides engineers with a detailed understanding of how physiological systems function and
how body parts—muscle, tissue, bone—are constituted, it also discusses how engineering methodology
can be used to deal with systems and parts that need to be assisted, repaired, or replaced.
I have sought to produce a practical manual for the biomedical engineer who is seeking to solve
a problem, improve a technique, reduce cost, or increase the effectiveness of an organization. The
Handbook is not a research monograph, although contributors have properly included lists of applic-
able references at the ends of their chapters. I want this Handbook to serve as a source of practical
advice to the reader, whether he or she is an experienced professional, a newly minted graduate, or
even a student at an advanced level. I intend the Handbook to be the first information resource a prac-
ticing engineer reaches for when faced with a new problem or opportunity—a place to turn to even
before turning to other print sources or to sites on the Internet. (The Handbook is planned to be the
core of an Internet-based update or current-awareness service, in which the Handbook chapters
would be linked to news items, a bibliographic index of articles in the biomedical engineering
research literature, professional societies, academic departments, hospital departments, commercial
and government organizations, and a database of technical information useful to biomedical engi-
neers.) So the Handbook is more than a voluminous reference or collection of background readings.
In each chapter, the reader should feel that he or she is in the hands of an experienced consultant who
is providing sensible advice that can lead to beneficial action and results.
I have divided the Handbook into eight parts. Part 1, which contains only a single chapter, is an
introductory chapter on applying analytical techniques to biomedical systems. Part 2, which contains
nine chapters, is a mechanical engineering domain. It begins with a chapter on the body’s thermal
behavior, then moves on to two chapters that discuss the mechanical functioning of the cardiovas-
cular and respiratory systems. Six chapters of this part of the Handbook are devoted to analysis of
bone and the musculoskeletal system, an area that I have been associated with from a publishing
standpoint for a quarter-century, ever since I published David Winter’s book on human movement.
Part 3 of the Handbook, the domain of materials engineering, contains six chapters. Three deal
with classes of biomaterials—biopolymers, composite biomaterials, and bioceramics—and three
deal with using biomaterials, in cardiovascular and orthopedic applications, and to promote tissue
regeneration.
The two chapters in Part 4 of the Handbook are in the electrical engineering domain. They deal
with measuring bioelectricity and analyzing biomedical signals, and they serve, in part, as an intro-
duction to Part 5, which contains ten chapters that treat the design of therapeutic devices and diag-
nostic imaging instrumentation, as well as the design of drug delivery systems and the development
of sterile packaging for medical devices, a deceptively robust and complex subject that can fill entire
books on its own. Imaging also plays a role in the single-chapter Part 6 of the Handbook, which cov-
ers computer-integrated surgery.