CLEVELAND, Ohio — From the Orthotic Arm-Aid to a vest that maps the electrical activity of the heart; from neurostimulation devices to biocompatible materials for medical implants, the Biomedical Engineering Department at Case Western Reserve University has done it all over the last four decades.
Faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends are celebrating the department’s 40 years of innovation today with reflections from past department chairs, alumni awards and a speech — “A Revolutionary Journey: The History, State and Future of the Biomedical Industry” — by Medtronic Inc. chairman and chief executive, Bill Hawkins.
In honor of the event, the department published a 58-page booklet about its history, which will be handed out today.
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“I was here in the ’80s as a student,” said Jeffrey Duerk, department chair and director of the Case Center for Imaging Research, who came to the Case department to earn his PhD and never left. “And what we do today as biomedical engineering would be almost unrecognizable to the people who graduated with me.”
Duerk describes biomedical engineering as the combination of biology, chemistry, physics and physiology with electronics, instrumentation and mechanics as a discipline.
“The thing that is compelling to me, and I think it’s a signature of the Case School of Engineering, the BME students who graduate from here — either undergrad or graduates — they are engineers. Even though they are biomedical engineers, they are hard-core engineers.”
What does that mean? An engineer is “basically, a problem-solver,” said Duerk, who also is Allen H. and Constance T. Ford professor in biomedical engineering, and professor of radiology and oncology in Case’s medical school. “Somebody who can identify the important problem that needs to be solved and apply basic science principles to create the best solution.”
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One of the distinctions of the Case department — it’s jointly run by the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine.
“That’s what makes this field so compellingly fun is, it’s not just the physiology, but how does the physiology link to the physics?” Duerk said.  “From my research in MR imaging, not only do I have to understand how the image is generated and how the body’s physical properties allow me to create an image, based on the physics, but also why is it that blood flow looks so dramatically different than stationary tissue.
“There’s no way an electrical engineer would understand that.”