Guide to Medical Diagnostic Instruments--Intro and Article Index

The field of medical diagnostic instruments has developed very well during the past 25 years with the impact the Electronics Engineering has provided to it. Today, more and more of Electronic & Instrumentation Engineering students have taken to work on the development of either better Instruments using the Technology or of new instrumental techniques for better and non-invasive diagnostics. In the U.S.A., graduate students from India are now being taken to work in this area for research projects in the Universities and hospitals. Side by side, medical graduates also are now taking interest in learning about the developments in Electronics so that they can use its components and circuits for making better use in Medical Technology.

Therefore, today, most Engineering graduate and Science post-graduate courses have included the subject in the curriculum. It is now well understood that for a technology re searcher to interact with the hospital surgeons and seniors in projects of medical instrumentation, he or she should have a good knowledge of the principles of early-day medical instruments, physiology basics and medical terminology.

This guide has therefore subdivided the realm of medical instruments into the same sections like a text on physiology and introduces the basic early-day methods well, before dealing with the details of present-day instruments currently in use. Some principles of diagnosis are also included in order that a new researcher could understand the requirements of the Physician rather than blindly proceed in his developments using his knowledge of circuitry, software and methods of signal processing. Further, medical diagnostic practice has been conservative in preserving the acumen the Physicians have imbided from their seniors. For example, in the ECG, the very same trace occupying just 2 mm-3 mm with a chart paper is the vital (QRS) component in diagnosis, though, at present, the same information can be presented in a much better time-scale with greater detail. Because ECG diagnosis is still based on this standard record, a researcher intending to produce a new algorithm for a detection of typical pathology (automatically) would need to know the principles of pathological detection from the ECG in current use. That is why the guide has spent some pages on such aspects as well.

After covering the several instruments under the different heads of Physiology, the later day instruments like the CT scanner, the MRI, Ultrasound and lasers are included. These deserve typically separate volumes on their own, but even here, the essentials are covered both from the medical and technical angles.

Particular importance has been given to safety aspects as has been widely made known through several papers in the IEEE magazines, in a separate section. A section on possible further developments and another on signal processing examples have been included to the advantage of a medical reader intending to exploit the technological developments.

A final section on the use of computers for medical data management and the use of the Web at large concludes the guide.

In a guide of this kind, meant to be of use for the student who gets himself introduced to medical instruments for the first time, a large number of books, journals and manufacturers' material had to be referred to. Today, the subject is growing at a very fast pace and newer methods in surgery and diagnostics are coming up every day. The guide could cover only such material as are current and it is up to the reader to keep himself abreast of the developments by looking into the useful journals for example, the IEEE issues. A little work done by the author's own Biomedical and Engineering group has been included in the section on new developments.

It is hoped that the guide will meet the needs of all these who take to the study of this subject either in a course or for research applications, both in medical and in electronic technology.

Article Index

0. Intro and Article Index (this page)

1. Electrophysiological Measurements

2. Electrocardiography

3. Circulatory System

4. Electroencephalogram

5. Electromyography (EMG)

6. Respiratory Testing Instruments

7. ENT and Opthalmic Instruments

8. Ultrasound Medical Diagnostic Instrumentation

9. X-Ray Instruments

10. CT Scanning

11. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

12. Surgical Instruments

13. Some New Development in Medical Instruments

14. Signal Processing in Medical Instruments

15. Safety Measures in Bio-Medical Instruments

16. Electro Chemical Instruments

17. Patient Monitoring System and Bio-Telemetry

18. Practical Electronic Laboratory Experiments

19. Recorders in Medical Instruments

20. Computers and Medical Data Base Management Including Web References

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