Biomedical Engineering (BME)
BME is an interdisciplinary subject that attempts to understand and solve some problems in medical treatment from the perspective of engineering technology.
When Mr. Lu Weixue first founded the biomedical engineering major in China, it was for medical instruments. With the development of instrument technology, it has included most medical instruments and equipment and research, and later included Basic research directions in biological mechanisms. After the development of medical informatization, software directions and informatics research related to medical informatization were added. After the rise of genetic technology, some people are engaged in genomics and bioinformatics research.
As mentioned above, BME covers many completely different directions. On the one hand, this is because medical treatment itself contains too many things, and on the other hand, it also reveals the helplessness of interdisciplinary subjects. Every bit of medicine, combined with different technologies and research, can form a large number of branches. Not only are the professors in the mountains, but outsiders also think the discipline is too scattered. Not to mention different schools and different laboratories, even if we are in the same laboratory, the research conducted by doctoral students in different directions has almost no overlap. Even several students in the same direction with different focuses are doing completely different things, but only There can be some discussion on the basic methods.
Different research directions, the so-called prospects for further study and employment are also inconsistent.
In my experience, it is easier to publish articles on research related to biology and basic medicine, and it is also easier to go abroad.
As for the direction that is more closely integrated with the application of actual engineering technology, the students trained will have stronger technical abilities, have more experience in participating in engineering projects, and have more experience in dealing with the actual medical environment.
In my own environment, I am engaged in research on medical informatization, mainly using computer software to support some problems in hospital diagnosis, treatment and management. Needless to say, there are certain requirements for software development and project management capabilities, so most of the master's students around me went to IT companies after graduation, including traditional IT companies and Internet companies. Some have also entered Healthcare IT companies, but the domestic HIT market is still taking shape. Many companies use low-level price wars to occupy the market, so they do not invest much in R&D. The income of IT practitioners who join these companies is higher than that of Internet companies. Be lower.
However, for doctoral students, due to the lag in China's medical informatization level, informatization construction is only in a "full meal" state, which is different from foreign trends that have already considered information sharing and data utilization. Very far. Therefore, it is difficult to form a theoretical breakthrough in existing project practice. But having said that, medical IT itself is a vertical field of enterprise software. Innovation in this field itself faces the constraints of the form of the enterprise itself.
On the other hand, if you have medical data, you can do a lot of things using some data mining methods. For example, you can apply some basic machine learning methods to medical data and publish articles. The advantage of this method is that through cooperation between universities and hospitals, medical data can be easily obtained. However, this matter is subject to many restrictions abroad because foreign privacy management is stricter. However, the disadvantage is that the quality of domestic medical data is generally low. Teachers who do research in this area often complain that the quality of hospital data is too poor, and the lack of information and errors cause great trouble to research.
Therefore, if you are considering an undergraduate major, I personally do not recommend choosing BME. Because you will find that you have to take courses taught by teachers in each of the above directions, and the learning is complicated but not in-depth. Due to the ambiguity of the professional name itself, the job market lacks awareness of it. When submitting resumes, many students are directly screened out because of the professional name.
If you are engaged in research, you should also carefully consider the direction in which you are pursuing it.
And if you just want to use it as a springboard for going abroad or finding a job, then you also need to carefully consider the support and impact of different directions on your goals. Show all