Platforms for Engineering Biomedical Experiments

Due to the highly stochastic nature of biological systems, the systematic design, validation, and verification of systems for biomedical experiments in laboratory and clinical applications are complex activities. This paper presents a platform framework for the modeling of these biological components in the context of system-level analysis. By integrating models of biological systems with those of physical engineering systems, one can obtain a set of potential architectures that satisfy the requirement specifications of the application. Such models can aid in the analysis of biomedical systems intended for applications in medical science, where the stochastic elements are the biological components themselves. A prototype application is presented that implements this platform framework for the development of a microfluidic assay device for the study of antibacterial treatments of bacterial biofilms. The results of our work indicate that looking forward, platforms will facilitate early validation and verification of biomedical devices, and enable the development of more efficient and effective experimental biomedical systems.