Facilities

The Biomedical Engineering Department is housed on the first and second floor of the MRI Building on the main campus of the Medical Center. The clinical MR and CT imaging units are on the same floor as the medical imaging space, and images from MR, CT, and other modalities can be acquired via any of the workstations. The Positron Emission Tomography Center and cyclotron are located in the basement, one floor below the medical engineering area.

Flow Lab

A flow lab is available to support our current research in heart valve and blood vessel hemodynamics and other mechanical flow phenomena.  Computer controlled flow pumps are used to produce physiologically correct flow patterns that can be used with dye visualization or for quantitative flow measurements with magnetic resonance imaging.  LabView is used for real time control and data acquisition.

Computer

The computing facilities are available to all students, faculty, and staff in the department.  Students are given IBM Thinkpads upon entering the program with on board Matlab and TeraRecon thin-client programs with connectivity to a high-performance server. Two terabyte large capacity storage is available and is regularly backed up to tape. Communications consists of 100BaseT on the premises and a 155-megabit-per-second ATM link to the Internet and Abilene. There are two teleclassrooms that allow conference and class connections to other universities in the state as well as satellite downlinks. Classes are regularly offered and are available from universities such as Virginia Tech, NC State, UNC in Chapel Hill and Charlotte, and Duke. Other facilities include the fMRI image processing laboratory, impact research laboratory, cardiology image Processing Lab, a mechanical shop for phantom fabrication and other projects, an electrical shop, a wet lab, an x-ray room, and office space for students and staff.

Office

Telephone, internet computer, fax, and copier capability all exist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.