CUBEC
What does the acronym CUBEC stand for?
Canadian Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Council.
What type of force causes a material to stretch or elongate when pulled?
Tension (Tensile force)
What common medical device measures the electrical activity of the heart and displays it as a waveform?
An electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG)
Which organelle is primarily responsible for producing ATP through aerobic cellular respiration?
The mitochondrion (mitochondria)
What type of medical device replaces or supports the function of a missing or impaired limb?
A prosthesis (prosthetic limb)
In what year did CUBEC begin as a student-led initiative to connect and support undergraduate biomedical engineering students across Canada?
2020
What is the name of the protein that allows tendons to withstand high tensile loads and gives them much of their structural strength?
Collagen
Which medical imaging technique uses high-frequency sound waves and their returning echoes to create images of internal structures?
Ultrasound imaging (sonography)
What is the name of the process by which cells divide to produce two genetically similar daughter cells for growth and tissue repair?
Mitosis
What is the name of the engineering process in which a prototype is repeatedly tested and modified based on feedback to improve its performance?
Iterative design (iterative prototyping)
Which two university student groups originally came together to establish CUBEC?
BMEUSA at the University of British Columbia and BUSS at McGill University
According to Hooke's law, what mechanical property describes the ratio of stress to strain in the linear elastic region of a material?
Young's modulus (elastic modulus)
Which imaging modality uses strong magnetic fields and radiofrequency pulses to produce detailed soft-tissue images without using ionizing radiation?
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
In Michaelis–Menten enzyme kinetics, what does the parameter Km represent, under the standard model?
The substrate concentration at which the reaction velocity is half of Vmax.
A wearable ECG records muscle activity and electrical interference in addition to the heart's signal. What signal-processing technique can help remove frequency components outside the desired ECG bandwidth?
Filtering, such as an appropriate low-pass or band-pass filter.
What is the name of CUBEC's national biomedical engineering competition, developed in collaboration with the Western Biomedical Engineering Club, that challenges undergraduate teams to design solutions to real-world healthcare problems?
The True North Biomedical Competition (TNBC)
A bone implant is significantly stiffer than the surrounding bone, causing the implant to carry a disproportionate amount of the load. What phenomenon can lead to bone resorption around the implant?
Stress shielding
In a pulse oximeter, oxygen saturation is estimated using red and infrared light. What optical property of oxygenated versus deoxygenated hemoglobin makes this measurement possible?
They absorb red and infrared light differently, allowing their relative concentrations to be estimated from the detected light signals.
In a simplified model of oxygen diffusion across a tissue, Fick's law predicts that diffusion rate increases with surface area and concentration gradient. What happens to diffusion rate if the diffusion distance doubles while all other variables remain constant?
It decreases by half, assuming steady-state diffusion through a uniform medium.
A diagnostic test has 95% sensitivity and 90% specificity. What do these two measures describe, respectively?
Sensitivity -> true positives; Specificity -> true negatives
CUBEC's mission is built around three central pillars. Name all three, and explain how they support its goal of connecting undergraduate biomedical engineering students across Canada.
Awareness, Education, and Inclusion
A porous scaffold is designed for bone tissue engineering. Why might increasing its porosity improve tissue integration while simultaneously reducing its compressive strength?
Greater porosity improves space for cell infiltration, vascularization, and nutrient transport, but reduces the load-bearing solid material and can weaken the scaffold.
In MRI, which parameter describes how quickly transverse magnetization decays due to spin-spin interactions, and why can shortening it make certain tissues appear darker on a T2-weighted image?
T2 relaxation time. A shorter T2 produces faster transverse signal decay, resulting in lower signal intensity on T2-weighted images.
A tissue-engineered construct has living cells throughout its interior, but the cells in the centre die despite adequate nutrient concentrations at the outer surface. What transport limitation is a likely cause, and what engineering strategy could help address it?
Limited oxygen and nutrient diffusion over long distances. Strategies include introducing vascular-like channels, reducing construct thickness, or improving perfusion through the scaffold.
A machine-learning model for detecting disease achieves 98% accuracy on a training dataset but performs poorly on new patients from a different hospital. Name two potential reasons for this failure and one validation strategy that could better assess generalizability.
Possible reasons include overfitting, data leakage, and distribution shift between hospitals. A suitable strategy is external validation on an independent patient cohort from a different hospital.