Bioelectronics and Bioinformatics

Advances in electromagnetics, microelectronics, nanotechnology, image/signal processing, sensors, computer architecture, and control systems are fueling the genomics revolution, point-of-care medical treatment, personalized medicine, fundamental understanding of the human brain, and advanced medical technologies for creating images of physiology that extend from entire organs down to single molecules within cells.

For example, advanced computer architectures enable efficient processing of the enormous DNA sequencing datasets, which in turn generates a more fundamental understanding of the biological processes underlying diseases, which in turn helps to identify novel classes of nucleic acid and protein biomarkers that can be detected in bodily fluids to perform disease diagnostics with unprecedented sensitivity, and to provide new clinical tests that can guide physicians to the most optimal course of treatment for a specific patient. Novel sensor technologies that utilize nanoparticles as contrast agents can be used to detect disease-relevant molecules with single molecule precision, and to provide contrast in medical imaging that can guide surgeons with augmented reality vision that can guide accurate removal of tumor margins. By manipulating and measuring electromagnetic fields and ion flow at the scale of individual cells, new approaches are being developed that enable a more thorough understanding of processes that occur at neural synapses. These novel approaches generate enormous datasets, whose features must be efficiently parsed for applications that range from enabling real-time medical imaging, to visualizing complex genetic and proteomic pathways that guide living systems.