International Education Program
In 1990 all the education at the Ragnar Granit Institute was overnight changed to be given in English.
Important motivation for this was to educate the Finnish students so as to become more international.
Accepting international students into the program further strengthened this target.
A great deal of the education of the Institute has been given abroad on intensive courses and as visiting professorship lectures.
www.bem.fi/edu/
International Master's
Degree Program in BME
In 2005 the Ministry of Education in Finland launched a call for International Master's Degree Programs
in Finnish universities. From Tampere University of Technology, altogether six applications were made.
From these, four programs were accepted by the Ministry of Education. One of these is Biomedical Engineering.
This autumn about 15 new international students started in the program.
www.rgi.fi/www/edu/
International Graduate School
Because there was an apparent need for a joint graduate school in biomedical engineering
for the Finnish universities, discussions on a Graduate School were initiated by the Finnish Society
for Medical Physics and Medical Engineering in 2005. The universities participating in these discussions
were Tampere University of Technology, Helsinki University of Technology, University of Turku,
University of Kuopio and the University of Oulu. It was accepted that the application to the call of
Ministry of Education and Academy of Finland should be made by the Ragnar Granit Institute.
The International Graduate School in Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics
was appointed by the Ministry of Education to start in January 2007. The Ministry will fund 8 PhD
student positions in the School.
www.bem.fi/ibiomep/index.htm
European Virtual Campus
In addition to education and research we do research on education. We have a two-year
European project: European Virtual Campus on Biomedical Engineering, EVICAB under the coordination of the RGI.
Its purpose is to establish a curriculum on BME to the Internet for the use of the
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European universities. Because the curriculum will be open source, it will actually be available worldwide. The co-operating partners are, in addition to Finland, from Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and Czech Republic.
www.evicab.eu
Research
The main area of research in the Institute is Bioelectromagnetism, i.e. bioelectric and biomagnetic signals, stimulation and properties of the living body. The research has included both theoretical issues and experimental work.
The main contributions in the theoretical work have been in the development of the lead field theory. It has been the method in the research on the relationship between bioelectric and biomagnetic phenomena, the information content of biomagnetic signals and comparison of the sensitivities of electro- and magnetoencephalography, EEG and MEG.
In electrocardiology the central research topic has been in diagnosing coronary artery disease. The latest activities include the development of wearable and implantable ECG-recorders for continuous monitoring of the cardiac function. The electric activity of the heart has also been recorded by detecting the magnetic field it generates, the magnetocardiogram, MCG.
The research on the electric activity of the brain also includes both theoretical and experimental work. The theoretical studies include calculation of the measurement sensitivity distribution and spatial resolution of EEG and MEG. Theoretical work has also been done on developing new EEG leads for recording deep sources in the brain. Experimental work includes developing the high resolution EEG and recordings with a 256-channel instrument. In one ongoing project there is being developed instrumentation for recording EEG in emergency site and developing methods and criteria for the clinical usefulness of emergency EEG recordings.
Electric and magnetic stimulation of the central nervous system has also included both theoretical and experimental studies.
Many of our experimental projects have been based on our research on the modeling of the electric fields of the body. In this research both the theory of computational methods and 3D imaging and image analysis have been important subjects of research.
New openings in our research include application of our expertise of modeling and bio- electromagnetism in general in cell culturing and tissue engineering.
Most of our research projects are made in close co-operation with the hospitals and biomedical engineering industry.
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