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Join Date: Aug 2008
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4BD3: Biomedical Instrumentation
Elec Eng 4BD3: Medical Imaging
Overview:
This course is a culmination of your work with filters, bode plots, circuit design and analysis, anatomy and physiology, and other random courses you've taken as a biomedical engineering student (if this isn't an elective). Professor who teaches this varies, but the one I had (Patricu) was fairly decent, if not a bit derpy.
There was a midterm, 4 assignments, 5 labs, and an exam (closed book, formula sheet).
Professor is not that approachable, and while he's smart, he's not very good at explaining topics, even when talking 1-on-1 highly. Despite this, the labs were interesting and useful, and I believe I took a lot away from this course, especially when it came to working on my capstone project.
Course Structure:
3 lectures a week, one tutorial, 1 Lab EOW (every other week)
Tutorial focused on specific problems the TA thought were important, which related to course content a lot. There was some talk of assignment problems, but not so much, and depended on if somebody asked him to do it ahead of time.
Course website is kept up-to-date, lectures on the site well ahead of time.
'Pre-reqs':
Math courses, circuits, bode, frequency, anatomy and physiology course, filters, and instrumenation.
Lectures:
Lectures are fine, professor can be a bit bad at certain topics, but is clear and goes slow. Tutorial is excellent and the TA of my year was very prepared and through.
Course Material:
Textbook - optional (but will aid a lot in assignment completion and for studying!)
Lecture notes - will be your main source of studying or used on tests (see below)
Supplmentary notes - at times, these will be so much better than the actual ones you'll be wondering what the point of lectures were
Examination:
Midterm test - closed book. Patricu had a tendancy to test on things that hadn't been covered much in lecture, especially when it came to real life application problems. He will also test at least one or two things he extensively derived, like CMRR, but expand on it, forcing you to partially re-derive the equation because he changed a resistance value or configuration. Tests are certainly a-typical and can throw you off guard, but if they're too hard or unfair, he makes adjustments (usually because he made a mistake).
Assignments (x5) - All by hand. A few plotting things that can/should be done, but mostly analytical, similar to what he will test on. Final assignment is a research paper where you pick a topic not covered that much in the course and have at it. Worth way to few marks... don't put too much time into it, because I did and it really didn't matter as much, but it was the most fun I'd ever had in a course.
Exam - exact same format as midterm (practice tests available)
Overall Impression:
The course content was fun, interesting, applied to real life, used in other courses, and will actually stick with you... but it's not fun to study for due to the extent of material and futility of trying to remember it all. Main topics that you must know 100%: filters (butterworth/tschebshev) and how to design them in multi-filter system, noise, OP amps CMRR etc, safety, random sensors (he'll only test on one or two so you must pick up mind-reading on the side), and finally, random topics from other courses such as simple integration (which you may not have done for quite some time) and various things with exponentials. Active filters and Texus Instruments supplementary source manuals are your friends.
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