Biomedical engineering

Faculty members participating in biomedical engineering:

The biomedical research area covers several sub-areas across the department including nanotechnology, silicon devices and integrated circuits, circuits and systems, computer software, communications and information systems, pattern analysis and machine intelligence, systems and controls, wireless communications, and antennas, microwaves and wave optics.

Our research interests are diverse, and currently include: biomedical ultrasound imaging and therapy, medical diagnostic X-ray imagers, medical image processing (denoising, registration, segmentation, restoration, etc.), medical image analysis (object detection and tracking, automatic diagnosis), telemedicine (real-time transmission of image/video), linear stochastic systems, human motion analysis, machine learning, human-robot interaction, MEMS/MOEMS, CMOS integration, Lab-on-chip devices and medical diagnostics, biocompatibility of patterned metals, circuits for implantable neural recording systems, nonlinear systems, optimal lossy and lossless data compression algorithms, bioelectromagnetics, and robotics.

The department’s biomedical research group benefits from exceptional research facilities:

1. The Laboratory on Innovative Technology in Medical Ultrasound (LITMUS) houses a number of reconfigurable ultrasound scanners for research on advanced ultrasound imaging techniques, and is equipped with acoustic field measurement systems for exposure calibration and therapeutic ultrasound investigations. The lab works closely with the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging, Ontario’s first purpose-built teaching long-term care home with a 192-bed capacity.
2. The Adaptive Systems Laboratory develops systems for incremental learning and adaptation in dynamic environments and is currently developing algorithms for incrementally building models of human motion and human behavior through online observation of natural human activity.
3. The Leitch-University Multimedia Communications Laboratory is one of the largest, leading laboratories of its kind in multimedia communications in Canada. The lab is equipped with state of the art imaging and audiovisual devices including a non-linear video processing system, high-end backbone computing infrastructure for developing multimedia processing algorithms, and test-beds for testing algorithms and interfaces in wired and wireless environments.
4. The Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems (CIARS) demonstrate innovation in all aspects of electromagnetic communication and sensing engineering. CIARS is a world-class electromagnetic device and communication/sensing system development/characterization facility and consists of four interconnected indoor laboratories, one outdoor lab, and a highly advanced computational facility.

Faculty members in the biomedical research group hold prestigious research chairs including the RIM Industrial Research Chair and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair.

Some of the current projects are: ultrasound imaging innovations, therapeutic ultrasound biophysics studies, small animal micro-CT, PACS (picture archiving and communication system), on-line measurement and analysis of human movement using rehabilitation technology to track gait measurement of stroke patients undergoing gait rehabilitation, and the significant benefits of feedback with patients undergoing rehabilitation following hip and knee replacement surgery, a low-dose, low-cost x-ray imaging system, photon counting circuits for biomedical imaging, low cost x-ray detectors in amorphous silicon technology, an amorphous selenium and CMOS-based high resolution x-ray detector, and a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), Cancer Sniffer: A Millimeter-wave Reflectometer for Skin Cancer Pre-screening, Enabling Technologies for Intelligent Wireless Sensor Network for Mobile Health.

Graduate students acquire hands-on training in many aspects of biomedical engineering and are highly sought-after both by academia and industry after graduation. Some of our graduates have gone on to work in the Department of Radiology at Stanford, the Medical Devices Regulatory group in the FDA, the Perkin Elmer Digital X-ray Group, Apple's Biomedical Division, and Illumina Genomics.