[RyanC]

Overview:

The purpose of this course is to firstly give a conceptual understanding of the generation and propagation of electricity in body systems. This material is built upon by developing the mathematical prowess in students to quantify ionic, stimulated, and recorded currents as they travel through tissues and biological material. Microcircuit analysis all the way up to practical application is covered.

Course was similar in structure to ELECT 3BA3.

Course Structure:

3 lectures and one tutorial a week

Course website is simple to navigate, and all updates, lecture notes, past assignments, past examinations are posted there, in addition to professor email.

Lectures:

Most lecture is a slight and gradual addition to the previous one, but don't be surprised if new concepts are introduced without gradualness. Attendance is necessary when the professor covers examples or elabouration on notes. Content difficulty increases as depth into a particular topic increases and drops back to 0 (easy, harder, harder, hardest, new topic, easy, harder...etc), so its not easy to get 'lost in the course' if you miss a lecture or two, but be sure to use office hours to get caught up in the things you miss.

Lectures will take place in a small room, and is intimate and relaxed enough to ask questions or discuss topics. Lectures are power point and chalkboard writing.

Tutorials:

Tutorial questions are orders of magnitude harder than the actual lecture content, and answers are not posted, so, so attending these tutorials is the bare minimum you should do for this course, and doing a little prepartion will help a lot.

Always math-based. Concepts based on physics, and math seen in other courses.
TA is fairly good at explaining but solutions to tutorials are not posted, so attendance is mandatory.

Course Material:

Textbook - free eBook available by professor's link through LibAccess (couldn't find a full book, only chapters, so I had to merge the PDFs)
Website
Additional resources provided by professor
Office hours

Examination:

Lab: There will be a practice lab and a graded lab. A MATLAB addon was used to demonstrate trans-membrane potential as a fuction of time. Ask questions, get 100% on the practice and the graded is easy.

Midterm test: Half multiple choice, half written answer. Written answers are a mixture of mathematical, and conceptual understanding of course content. (closed book, unlike ELECT 3BA3)

Examination: Same as midterm only more content and length is much longer. Closed book. Equation sheets (14?) provided. For the equations, just where they are, and how they should be applied, rather than memorize. Most of exam content is based on (60%+) most recent material after second midterm.

Overall Impression:

Fun and in-depth course that will be much more practical than the previous one, but really math based (intergo-differential based derivation of key equations; hardest thing is taking the 2nd derivative of some ridiculously long equation involving cos's and exponentials) and coincides with past electrical courses and has some crossover with what you'll be taking in other courses at the same time. No prerequisites other than Biomed III, but assumed knowledge is, again of physics, trig, random chemistry, maths and anatomy.

There was a conflict in semester two so this course was taught in parallel with ELEC ENG 3BA3 by Dr. Bruce as well. The course has been pretty interesting as it shows the basis for modelling bio-electricity with the basic circuit building blocks that were drilled into our minds in second year. Due to this being taught in first semester, it gave a great foundation for the membrane potential and neurotransmission units taught in anatomy at the same time, which cut studying time for both, which is always good.

I haven't really been keeping up with the course and the material is becoming more interesting but the mathematical modelling that is being used is getting more intense, as stated above. It's not too bad and just like with ELEC ENG 3BA3, Bruce is a very fair prof and is eager to help out. With that being said, I probably should have kept up with this course a bit more up til now, but things usually turn out okay.

The exam was very fair and the majority of it was composed of material covered after the second midterm. Dr. Bruce is a great prof and very helpful. The latter material ended up being very interesting but there was a lot of it and it became tiresome to go through all of it. Bruce posts past tutorials/assignments/tests/exams so you know EXACTLY what types of questions to prepare for as there are only so many types of questions you could really ask.

All-in-all, solid course. Solid prof. Very manageable to do well in this course.