TUBES

The Annual TUBES Spring Weekend took place in Cookstown, Co Tyrone in April of this year For the uninitiated, TUBES are The Ulster Bio-Engineering Society and every year they offer an interesting, hospitable and fun-filled weekend. As noted before in The Spectrum, TUBES is an organisation open to all areas of Bio-Engineering, however, its main focus, seems to have become the area of joints and prosthesis. It is a well-established organisation and this year hosted a very eminent guest lecturer.

Student presentations are strongly encouraged within TUBES and indeed, two sessions were dedicated to students' work. Topics covered included: Stimulus for evoked potentials; Cardiac beat detection, Multirate filtering implementation for audiogram matching; modelling of aortic heart valve haemodynamics; Hip and spinal prostheses. The more "mature" presenters spoke on areas as diverse as Automated Interpretation of Brainstem Auditory Evoked Potentials and Applications of Rapid Prototyping in Medicine.

As I mentioned above, the guest speaker was particularly interesting. Professor Beneken, from Eindhoven University is a former president of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine. He spoke on European Collaboration, its benefits and European Grant history, availability and applications. He also shared some of his experiences as a founder member of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine.

This was a weekend worth attending.

Meabh Smith