Biomedical engineering creates new breed of scientists

More than a century ago, universities were excited about “this thing called electricity” and raved about new electrical engineering departments, said William Ditto, Ph.D., professor and inaugural chair of UF’s new biomedical engineering department.

But even though today’s biomedical realities, such as merging machines with organic systems, may seem the stuff of science fiction, it won’t be long before universities nostalgically remember their biomedical engineering departments, Ditto said.

“We will look back on what we do now as quaint,” said Ditto, fresh on the UF campus from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he helped create the biomedical engineering department. “If you can imagine it, you can do it.”

Ditto recently gave students and UF faculty a glimpse of some of the “gee-whiz” research under way at UF. Further, he shared his vision to make UF a world leader in biomedical engineering, a standard that will be measured by graduates equipped with real-world capabilities and strong ethics.

“A new department is rising at the confluence of biology, medicine and engineering,” Ditto said.

These hybrid organic-machine inventions are the stuff of science fact, Ditto said. “The biomedical engineering community can grow brain tissue with synapses – the point where a nervous impulse passes from one neuron to another – on manufactured patterns. We’ve placed living tissue on a silicon chip that can navigate a virtual rat through a virtual maze.”

But not all research has kept pace with 21st century advancements, Ditto said. “The first line of defense against natural or bioengineered disease is when you and your kids get sick. It’s not a good system. It’s like the canary in a coal mine, but it’s the only way to detect bioterrorism or some yet undiscovered disease. The better alternatives are biosensors and early warning systems.”

The wide technology frontier and the ability to make meaningful differences are what have attracted students to biomedical engineering, Ditto said. The University of Florida's Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program started in the fall of 1998 when 13 students were admitted to the program. Now it is a department managed by the College of Engineering, and enrollment has increased to 60 students.

Ditto plans to form an advisory board with private-sector representatives to develop curriculum and pinpoint skills students will need. But he said he’s building on a foundation of strength. Ditto said, “I was amazed at the diversity of research at UF. In the McKnight Brain Institute, so many amazing things are being done – I’ve never seen so many MRI machines in one facility. Dr. (William) Luttge, the institute director, has built an amazing place. But we’re going to stretch those imaging systems to their limit. I’d even like to image some of these living computers as well. Dr. Luttge hasn’t seen anything yet.”

Ditto mentioned some of the advanced work under way at the Brain Institute, including the efforts of physicist Frank J. Bova, Ph.D., to improve computer-guided imaging systems to locate and treat brain tumors, as well as cancers in other parts of the body.

“The hardest problem in neurosurgery is separating the good things from the bad – the tumor that you take out, and the material you don’t take out,” he said. “Determining where these things are in space is a classic engineering problem. Imaging gives surgeons ideas about where to go in living tissue.

“MRI let’s us see the basis of function and malfunction in the brain and test interventions for the malfunction,” Ditto said. “Say we’re trying to understand epileptic seizure. We control it with a drug and scan to watch how the brain lights up. But say we decide to administer electric current. We can go back to the machine and watch how the brain responds. Then, suppose we intervene with a device that can prevent a seizure. We look at it all again.

“There are few places in the world other than the Brain Institute where you can watch all that happen,” Ditto said. “But the person who puts all the pieces together is the biomedical engineer because everybody else works on one piece of problem. The doctor puts out the fire. The clinician handles the fire at a distance. The neuroscientist understands the basic principles. But the biomedical engineer can follow the problem all the way through the chain.”