Biomedical Engineering is a fascinating, and an inherently multidisciplinary field involving an application of engineering techniques to assist doctors and physicians in medicine and healthcare, and also in rehabilitating the disabled. Application-examples include biomedical instrumentation (e.g., ECG monitor, Ventilator, hearing aid, pacemaker, etc.), signal processing (e.g., recording and analyzing signals such as ECG, EEG, sympathetic nerve activity, etc. towards extracting information useful for diagnostic purposes), medical imaging (e.g., radiography, mammography, Computed Assisted Tomography (CAT), Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasonic imaging, molecular imaging, etc.), medical image enhancement and processing towards information extraction (e.g., processing of foot-images for gait-analysis, images of the retina for detecting and assessing visual abnormalities due to diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, estimating the number of mycobacteria in images of sputum-smear towards assessing the degree of infection in tuberculosis, analyzing CT and MRI images, etc.), telemedicine (communication of medical data to and from remote places), and the development of software for healthcare-system-management, to name a few.


The student at the Dept. is trained to be a strong engineer, with a background in several subjects in the medical domain. In fact, they have the privilege of learning the medical-domain subjects through the members of the Faculty of various Depts. at the Kasturba Medical College, Manipal. Consequently, the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at the MIT is one of the few of its kind in the entire country, offering BE, MTech and PhD programs. The Dept. has two laboratories with state of the art infrastructure, facilities, and the ambience to help pursue studies towards gaining professional knowledge and improving competence.


In general, there is a rich scope for research in Biomedical Engineering, by virtue of its being a multidisciplinary field. Indeed, many of our students are currently pursuing higher degrees in reputed institutions abroad. Clearly, good scope for research implies scope for innovation and entrepreneurship. Thus, while many of our students have been working in reputed biomedical engineering companies, I would encourage the students to become good entrepreneurs, which is the need of the hour in India. Currently, thrust research areas at the Dept. include Image/signal processing, Biomedical Informatics, Instrumentation and Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).


I wish the student the very best in their pursuit of an academic degree at the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, MIT, Manipal.