A Lecture/Laboratory Course on Microcomputer-Based Medical Instrumentation

Most existing courses on computers in medicine study applications of minicomputers or large-scale mainframes. These courses typically emphasize data-base management or computer simulation of biological systems. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, our course has evolved away from these applications and toward design of microcomputer-based medical instrumentation. To support this course, we have developed a textbook on this topic and a set of ten laboratory experiments that give the student hands-on experience with both hardware and software aspects of instrument design.