BioEngineering

Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare (D2H2)

Contents

 

Faculty

Core Faculty

Other Faculty: Charles Campbell (chemistry); Martin Afromowitz, Karl Bohringer, Bruce Darling, Deirdre Meldrum (electrical engineering); Kirk Beach (surgery); Albert Moss, David Haynor, Brent Stewart, Stephen Carter (radiology); Irl Hirsh, Florence Sheehan (medicine); Ken Schenkman (pediatrics); Michael Chang (rehabilitation medicine).

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Description

diagram of D2H2 concept

The central questions addressed in this new thrust area will be:

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Areas of Research in D2H2 at UW

D2H2 is an outgrowth of miniaturization and integration of instrumentation for measurement, computing, data processing and communication, and healthcare informatics. The research projects underway depend on the research interests of the core and adjunct faculty. Selected topics include:

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Career Opportunities

There is a growing awareness that decentralization of medical care will be a central theme in development of biomedical technology in the new century. While there are no jobs that specifically will name "D2H2" as required background, the specialties that make up this new discipline are in rapid growth in industry, government, and academe, and bioengineering is the central discipline for this new field. For example, there are many new companies that have been founded in the last decade on the basis of developing microfabrication-based technology for use in biomedical diagnostics. Larger and older companies have established divisions to work in this area, or have acquired smaller companies that are focused in this area. Similar growth has been seen in the development of portable imaging technologies. Our students have no trouble finding employment in these areas.

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Degree Programs

Course credit requirements for MS and PhD degrees are those listed for the department. These will be more or less evenly spread among bioengineering courses, engineering courses offered by other departments, and courses offered by other departments such as chemistry, physics, computer science, and medicine. Bioengineering courses will aim at conveying in detail some specific areas of research and expose the students to a variety of state-of-the-art, current enabling technologies. The thesis and research topics might be in any area related to the expertise of the faculty, and will most likely be among currently funded research areas.

Microfluidic Chemical Analytical Systems
Biomedical diagnostic technology must be inexpensive, chemically versatile, and relatively accurate to be successful as a commercial product. The size of samples of blood will be on the order of a few drops. This immediately brings us into the realm of microfluidics. Practical implementations of microfluidics require dealing with samples far more complex than those regularly introduced into instrumentation with such narrow channels. Microfluidic systems are highly vulnerable to problems inherent when unrefined samples are used in the applications for which these instruments are proposed. Surface fouling is a big problem in small channels. It can convert every fluid transport channel into a chromatography column, or, at worst, can lead to loss of the entire sample to an irreversibly adsorbed layer upstream of the detector. Bioengineering and affiliated departments, particularly Electrical Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, have a recent successful history of (and a growing commitment to) development of novel microfluidic sensing and transport technologies.

There have been a series of microfluidics projects supported by DARPA and venture capital at UW since 1993. The >$6 million in external microfluidics funding in Bioengineering alone has supported development of microfluidic instrumentation for biomedical diagnostics and biowarfare agent detection, using both "conventional" silicon and glass microfluidics, as well as new polymeric systems capable of both rapid prototyping and inexpensive bulk manufacturing. A steady stream of intellectual property has resulted in numerous licenses and in creation of a local company, Micronics, Inc., of Redmond, Wash.

Portable Ultrasonic Imaging
The University of Washington, with ATL, pioneered the research and development of a portable ultrasound device for battlefield trauma. Funding was granted by DARPA under the Technology Reinvestment Program. This UW initiative contributed to the development of SonoSite (an ATL spin-off company) and its five-pound hand-held device, which was commercialized in 1999. Even though this is not designed for home use, we believe that it will be introduced for home use in the next decade with decreasing costs and improving usability. In the beginning, it will be used for imaging the body and transmitting the resulting images to the clinic via telemedicine. However, it could be used eventually in both diagnosis and therapy.

Development of Medical Networking Technology
Recently, a number of companies (for example, Healtheon WebMD, MedicaLogic Medscape, ProxyMed, WellMed, OnHealth Network, and Sickbay.com) have been developing healthcare portal web sites. A typical portal site consists of news, discussion groups, and a database of patient education information, sometimes including links to other sites of interest. The goal is to have one place where patients can access health information and form a community to discuss that information and other healthcare-related topics. Some portals have also begun featuring multimedia webcasts. The flow of information, however, is primarily from portal to patient, and the portal sites have not done much to link patients with their physicians besides having databases of contact information. The Departments of Bioengineering and Orthopaedics have been working together on a novel Internet-based home telemedicine system. Called E-Medicine, the system can extend a web portal so that it can facilitate communications between patients and their physicians. Our system overcomes the traditional difficulties in publishing video and other multimedia data on the web so that patients can upload multimedia information to their medical records using a simple user interface.

We have developed a prototype system using the E-Medicine concept to monitor the recovery of patients following shoulder replacement surgery. Patients can access their medical records from home using a standard web browser and add data to the record using either standard web-based forms or web browser extensions. When browser extensions are used, multimedia data, such as video or biosensor data (for example, motion and acceleration sensors) can be added, all from home. Our prototype system includes an easy-to-use video capture plug-in so that physicians can monitor their patients' range of motion through the physical therapy process. The system can be described as a highly structured web-based e-mail site with the capability to easily add video or biosensor information to the e-mail messages. The key innovation of our E-Medicine (an invention has been disclosed to the UW Office of Technology Transfer) is that patients are able to add multimedia information to their own medical records and physicians can respond to that information in a structured and recorded way.

Although we are demonstrating the system using a post-surgical follow-up application, this technology can also benefit the elderly and patients with chronic disease. Patients in these groups can be monitored in their homes so that they do not need to expend considerable time and energy to visit the doctor's office when a visit is not necessary.

There are several other UW units that support the D2H2 program. The NSF ERC entitled UWEB (University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials) and the NIH Center entitled NESAC/Bio are the foci of decades of multi-million-dollar support from the federal government to develop novel surfaces and equipment to determine what is on those surfaces. This concentration of expertise and funding gives UW a unique ability to solve one of the tougher problems in developing such biomedical instrumentation: development of chemically and physically appropriate surface coatings. The Washington Technology Center, a state-funded entity, has, among its many activities, created and funded a large and user-friendly Si microfabrication facility at the UW campus, which is available to both UW researchers and companies on a fee-per-use basis. They also have begun to actively support MEMS-related research through targeted funding. The newly created Center for Applied Microtechnology (CAM) is a clearing house for information about MEMS and microelectronics-related information meant to serve both the UW and the industrial community, particularly in the Puget Sound area. To develop the new molecular chemistry and physics that will be the basis of the next generation of molecular diagnostics, the UW funded the Center for Nanotechnology with its University Initiatives Fund in 1997. Together these resources provide us with fertile ground for carrying on this line of work.

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Subspecialty Areas & Suggested Coursework

The suggested subspecialty areas that follow are meant as just as that. The course listings given below will assist you by suggesting what a particular program might target. The rule is that students should design their own programs, with care and deliberation, so that their advanced goals may be achieved. Choices should be made early in order to maximize the opportunities and minimize the duration of the overall program. The suggested graduation areas, or "specialty thrusts," may be regarded as a "minor" to the PhD program. The subspecialty areas and suggested coursework are built upon the Core courses for the department. For the D2H2 thrust, as with all areas in Bioengineering, it is important to balance courses inside and outside Bioengineering that directly advance the thesis work of the student with ones that provide breadth in the field. While the department requirements allow much flexibility, coherence in the program should be sought, with an eye to accomplishment in depth. In compliance with the most recent curriculum requirements of the department, students are required to fulfill a thrust requirement involving one in-depth sequence of 12 credits in the particular thrust area in which the student focuses. Four suggestions for fulfilling this requirement follow. They suggest possible D2H2 subspecialties for the student that correspond to research interests of the current D2H2 faculty. Four such programs are suggested below: 1) microfabrication for bioengineering applications, 2) cell based microdevices, 3) microfluidic phenomena and devices, and 4) instrumental design. We expect this list to grow as new faculty are added.

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Summary

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