Engineering constrained by biology and by regulators.
11 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Design Control Guidance for Medical Device Manufacturers
United States Food and Drug Administration · 1997
Sets out design controls as a traceable chain from user need to verified requirement to validated device, the regulatory framework every US medical…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
MIT 20.010J Introduction to Bioengineering
MIT OpenCourseWare · 2006
Applies engineering analysis to living systems, arguing that biology's feedback, noise and self-repair make it a different design substrate rather…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity
Warren S. McCulloch & Walter Pitts · 1943
Models a neuron as a simple threshold logic unit and shows that networks of such units can compute any proposition expressible in propositional…
+7 more at this level
12 of 13 works
United States Food and Drug Administration
Sets out design controls as a traceable chain from user need to verified requirement to validated device, the regulatory framework every US medical device must be shown to satisfy before sale.
link checked 17 Sept 2026MIT OpenCourseWare
Applies engineering analysis to living systems, arguing that biology's feedback, noise and self-repair make it a different design substrate rather than simply a more complicated one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026MIT OpenCourseWare
Argues an implant's success is decided at the material surface — what cells and proteins encounter there — rather than by the bulk material's mechanical properties alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Myron Spector & Ioannis V. Yannas (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Teaches medical device design as starting from a codified clinical problem rather than a technology looking for an application, through the FDA approval path a device must clear before it reaches a patient.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Susannah M. Engdahl, Michael A. Gonzalez, Christina Lee & Deanna H. Gates
Argues the long-running debate over body-powered versus myoelectric prostheses has been framed around the wrong metric, and that sensory feedback and movement planning, not grip strength, best predict which design a user actually keeps using.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Warren S. McCulloch & Walter Pitts
Models a neuron as a simple threshold logic unit and shows that networks of such units can compute any proposition expressible in propositional logic, founding the idea that neural and computational processes can be treated as the same kind of thing.
Godfrey N. Hounsfield
Describes the first working CT scanner, arguing that combining many one-dimensional X-ray absorption measurements taken at different angles and reconstructing them computationally reveals internal soft-tissue structure that projection X-rays cannot show.
Robert Langer & Judah Folkman
Shows that large protein molecules, thought too big to diffuse through a polymer, can in fact be released from one at a controlled rate for months, founding the field of controlled drug delivery.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Treats every major imaging modality — X-ray CT, MRI, ultrasound, nuclear imaging — as an instance of the same tomographic reconstruction problem, recovering an internal structure from projections.
link checked 17 Sept 2026MIT OpenCourseWare
Applies continuum and statistical mechanics across length scales, from the single molecule to the whole tissue, arguing biomechanics is one subject whether the object is a protein or a bone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026MIT OpenCourseWare
Treats the ECG, EEG and medical image alike as noisy signals to be filtered, transformed and modelled, arguing the same digital signal processing toolkit underlies both physiological monitoring and imaging.
link checked 17 Sept 2026MIT OpenCourseWare
Works through the materials-science and cell-biology principles behind scaffolds for tissue engineering, arguing a scaffold must be designed to disappear on a schedule that matches the tissue's own regeneration.
link checked 17 Sept 2026