Toronto: Day 4
Today started out with a tour of the IBBME building in the morning. This is a 100 million dollar building built specifically for cross disciplinary collaboration between Engineering, Dentistry and Medicine. To start off, we were given an introductory presentation by Professor Christopher Yip. We were then taken to different sections of the building where each graduate student gave us a brief description of his work. Two really cool things I saw: a polymer that can be used to cure bed sores (this is considered a medical device rather than a drug by the FDA, leading to a much shorter time-to-market.) The second was stem cells that were differentiated to be from the heart. You could actually see the cells beating under the microscope!
The second half of the course was a session by a recent biomedical engineering graduate of the UofT. She works for Baylis Medical Company as a research abd development engineer. Baylis is mainly into high-technology cardiology, pain management, and radiology products (pulled that from the website.) She gave a brief overview of chronic pains that occur due to the extra growth of nerve cells onto the spinal disc. Until recently, you had two kinds of treatments in the market. Completely non-invasive, but ineffective treatment used infrared rays. This had to be done quite often. The other extreme was opening up body and cutting out the nerves, but this was super invasive and expensive. The middle ground was to burn (literally) off these extra nerve growth.
Part of the talk was a design competition. The task was to come up with a design that would burn off these nerves. She showed us Baylis’ first prototype device, and designs used by competitors. There were ten teams in total and all of them came up with an over-engineered solution (including mine.) My team, which consisted of Mahkameh Lakzadeh and Hamed Valizadehasi from the University of British Columbia came up with a product called the AccuHeat. The design Baylis is current producing happened to be our first design we rejected because it was far too simple. Clearly, school wasn’t teaching us enough.
We then had a tour of downtown Toronto by bus. This bus takes you through the streets of downtown and the host tells us a bit of history about each significant landmark. Did you know that the Hudson’s Bay company was the oldest company of the British Commonwealth and Canada (until it was bought by an American company.) Or that Dave Chapelle’s show was house-full at 350 dollars a pop today? Or that five (or six) of the biggest hospitals of Toronto are concentrated in one block? So much fodder for Toronto trivia…
We also had a boat cruise from downtown Toronto. I had a major problem taking pictures in the dark. Darkness is caused by the scarcity of light (if you didn’t already know this.) To account for this, we either increase the aperture, or increase the exposure time. Increasing the exposure time only works if the image is static, which is definitely not so in a moving boat. The result is a bunch of blurred images. It was a fun ride, and the only complaint I had was ridiculously expensive drinks on board. That’s where the disguised orange juice comes into the picture…
After that, I took a bunch of guys to the Madison Pub which Shy showed me on Friday. All the walking had made me really tired, so I left early and went straight to bed. ZZZ…