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The biomedical engineering department uses the term problem-driven learning (PDL) to describe a suite of courses that have been informed by the problem-based learning (PBL) approach. Originally designed to prepare medical students for the clinic, the PBL curriculum was centered on having small teams of students diagnose the ailments of simulated patients, with the intended outcome that they would develop a deep understanding of the human body and the cognitive practices of diagnosis.
Similar to the medical community, we want our BME students to practice a particular reasoning and problem solving strategy referred to as model-based reasoning and, likewise, to anchor their knowledge in rich, complex cases that they have worked on and “solved”. PBL is an educational approach we feel is the most viable way to grow integrative thinkers and problem solvers capable of bridging the biosciences, engineering and medicine. Carefully designed, complex, ill-structured problems taken from the real world create the context and the motivation for students to practice the melding of bioscience knowledge with engineering analysis and design.
Initially, two courses, Problems in Biomedical Engineering I & II, grounded in the PBL approach, formed the foundation of the department’s pledge to implement curricular innovation on a more comprehensive level. Since then, the department has continued to encourage faculty to enact curricular change and the faculty have responded with “Problem-driven Learning (PDL)” innovations that are based on PBL and its two derivatives: Project-based Learning (PjBL) and Product-based Learning (PrBL)
Example BMED 1300 Problem Statement
Carcinoma of the pancreas ranks as the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the US. In 2011, of the estimated 44,030 new cases of pancreatic cancer, 37,660 will result in deaths). The overall survival rate at all stages is <1% at 5 years with most patients dying within 1 year. At present there are no reliable screening tests for detecting pancreatic cancer in asymptomatic persons. Among healthy subjects, CA19-9, a serologic marker potentially used for screening, has good specificity--- 85% but nevertheless generates a large proportion of false-positive results (positive predictive power 0.9%) due to the very low prevalence of pancreatic cancer in the general population. The predictive value of a positive test could be improved if a population at substantially higher risk could be identified.
Your team has been selected by the National Cancer Institute to investigate and evaluate current methods for pancreatic cancer screening, including the effectiveness of the most commonly used methods. You are then expected to identify and make recommendations regarding potential future screening strategies, which relative to current strategies enhance sensitivity without sacrificing specificity.
