Guide to Graduate Study in Area VII:
Scope of the Area
Roughly 35 faculty and research staff members and 50 graduate students are associated with the Bioelectrical Engineering Area of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Although the interests of these people are diverse, the areas in which they work can be categorized into roughly two sub-areas:
(1) Engineering with a Living Systems Component—primary focus is on engineering problems which contain a living system component or whose specification requires some knowledge of properties of living systems. Examples include: biomedical electronics and transducers; image and speech processing; computerized tomography; sensory aids for the deaf and blind; automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis.
(2) Living Systems—primary focus is on understanding living systems. Examples include: auditory physiology and psychophysics, human speech communication, the transmission and coding of signals in the nervous system; electromechanical properties of biological cells, tissues and membranes; optical properties of tissues; interaction of high-energy particles, laser radiation and ultrasound with living matter; methods for optical biopsy and detection of pathology; ophthalmic imaging; endoscopic optical coherence tomographic imaging.
These two sub-areas do not have rigid boundaries and many faculty members and students work on problems which have components in both sub-areas. For example, a student interested primarily in gaining an understanding of the speech production process may in the course of his/her work develop new procedures for speech synthesis by machine. Similarly, investigators interested primarily in bandwidth compression of pictures in order to increase transmission efficiency may need to understand some properties of the human visual system.