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Warwick Biomedical Engineering to the IUPESM World Congress of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering

The International Union for Physical and Engineering Sciences (IUPESM) is the umbrella organization for the International Organization for Medical Physics (IOMP) and International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE). This union is regarded as the world scientific society for biomedical engineering and medical physics and federates more than 100 national societies from all the 6 continents, and the main transnational societies such as IEEE EMBSor EAMBES.

Each 3-years, the IUPESM organizes the World Congress on Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, which this year was in Prague (WC2018).

This was the first time that the University of Warwick was so well and successfullyrepresented in this important event!

The School was represented by 10 Scholars: 5 PhD students Luis Montesinos, Mihaela Porumb, Davide Piaggio, Manuel Eichenlaub,Ziedo Solomon, 1 post-doc Dr Rossana Castaldo, 1 Academic Leandro Pecchiaand 3 associates to Dr Pecchia’s Lab: Dr Paolo Melillo, University Vanvitelli of Naples and Dr Ernesto Iadanza, Università di Firenze, Prof Daton Medenou, University Abomay Calavi (Benin).

The 10 fellows presented a significant variety of research topics on which Warwick and its partners are working on. This included deep-learning, biomedical signal processing, health technology assessment, clinical engineering, balance, sleep monitoring, mental stress, wearable sensing, medical devices for international development and predictive modelling.

Above all, Davide Piaggio (First year PhD student) was awarded the prestigious Student BME design for limited resources settings, for an App designed to transform a mobile phone in a pupilometer: a medical device that can be used by non-specialized doctors to early detect brain trauma or to monitor anaesthesia. This is very relevant in lower-incomesettings, where there is a clear lack of specialized staff.

Finally, Rossana Castaldo chaired one of the two sessions on Woman in Biomedical Engineering and presented the Work our School is doing for the Athena SWAN chartering.

Finally, Dr Pecchia was awarded the prestigious IFMBE Clinical Engineering Best paper award for his paper on HTA of Medical Devices in LMICsand delivered a keynote speech titled “Health Technology Assessment of medical devices: challenges, gaps and recent developments”.

 

During the World Congresses, the IUPESM, IOMP and IFMBE general assemblies elect the Administrate Councils and Divisions members, which will govern the 3 scientific societies for the next 3-6 years. Dr Pecchia was elected as Secretary General of the IUPESM (2018-2021) and treasurer of the IFMBE Clinical Engineering Division(2018-2024) as IUPEM/EAMBES nominee.

This is a timely opportunity for the impact that the School of Engineering and the University of Warwick may have in the future years, as the IFMBE and IOMP are NGOs in official relations with WHO, while the IUPESM is a member of International Council for Science (ICSU), and therefore an NGO in official relations with UN UNESCO. This will pave the way to Warwick relevant outputs in the domain of health technologies and human wellbeing, which will have the opportunity to be directly inputted in the UN WHO and UNESCO agendas.

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