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"Turn me on!!! - Electricity in the service of medicine"
BEST Summer Course on Biomedical Engineering
Ljubljana, Slovenija, 2004
BEST, the Board of European Students of Technology, is a non-profit and non-political organization for students,
run by students. It connects students from 64 technical universities in 25 European countries in a network which is
held together by common projects, common interests and friendship.
BEST strives to help students to become more internationally minded, by reaching a better understanding of European
cultures and developing capacities to work on an international basis. This can only be fulfilled by giving students of
technology all over Europe the opportunity to meet and learn from each other. In order to achieve our goals, we
organize a variety of academic events, such as 1-2 week courses and international seminars, and other events such as
cultural exchanges, internal meetings, etc.
Among 51 BEST Summer Courses all over Europe there was one about biomedical engineering. The local BEST
group in Ljubljana organized a two week course entitled "Turn me on!!! - Electricity in the service of medicine"
which took place from July 3 to July 17 in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. In those two weeks, 27 participants
from 15 different countries and 20 Slovenian students gained knowledge about biomedical engineering in general,
effects of electromagnetic fields on human health, how cells behave in an electric field, about electroporation
and electrochemotherapy and its use in clinical trials, about electrical activity of the heart, ECG, cardiac pacing
and defibrillation, functional electrical stimulation in rehabilitation, etc. Besides the lectures we had many
practical and laboratory sessions which showed us how theory looks in practice. For that reason we also visited
two Slovenian institutes - the Institute of Rehabilitation and the Institute of Oncology. The lectures were
organized by Professor Damijan Miklavcic and his colleagues from the Faculty of electrical engineering, University
of Ljubljana, the Institute of Oncology, the Institute for Rehabilitation and invited lecturers from abroad
(Croatia, France, USA). At the end, participants also had to pass an exam in order to get a certificate
for taking this course.
BEST Summer Courses are not just about learning, but also about spending two weeks in another country with
new colleagues, to get to know other cultures, Europe, to make new friendships and to have fun. With lectures
in the morning and many different social activities (rafting, city rally, games, international evening, etc)
in the afternoons and evenings we did our BEST to make those two weeks unforgettable for everybody.
For more information about BEST visit
http://www.BEST.eu.org
For more information about our BEST Summer Course visit
http://www.best.eu.org/ljubljana/activiti/SC04/TurnMeOn
The summer course was in part supported by OrthoLogic, Inc., USA, and Igea, s.r.l., Italy.
Primoz Trilar
Local BEST group Ljubljana
Email: trilko@hokej.si
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