Kolkata: IIT Kharagpur is set to introduce a four-year BTech programme in biomedical engineering in the upcoming academic season to create “a new class of professionals fluent in engineering rigour, clinical insight and translational impact”.
Students will be screened through JEE Advanced for the course to enable engineers, doctors, industry, civil society and public at large to share knowledge. Initially, 30 students will be enrolled.
The institute has also decided to convert School of Med-ical Science and Technology (SMST), which will offer the BTech course in biomedical engineering, into a full-fledged department. The school now offers MTech programmes in medical imaging and informatics, and biomedical engineering.
“Biomedical engineering has matured globally into an independent, high-impact discipline — powering breakthroughs from MRI and medical imaging to robotic surgery, prosthetics, diagnostics and digital hospitals, said Subhamoy Mandal, an assistant professor at SMST. “Biomedical engineering has matured globally into an independent, high-impact discipline — powering breakthroughs from MRI and medical imaging to robotic surgery, prosthetics, diagnostics and digital hospitals. India now stands at a pivotal moment. The country’s healthcare ecosystem is rapidly expanding, but there is a critical shortage of engineers capable of developing deployable technologies to address clinical problems. This course directly addresses that national gap,” said Subhamoy Mandal, an assistant professor at SMST.The four-year course, with its internationally benchmarked and future-facing curriculum, blends core engineering with hands-on approach to development of translational healthcare technology. It will be integrated with the institute’s medical school — B C Roy Institute of Medical Sciences.
“Through a unique living lab model, students will learn at the intersection of industry, hospital and academia. They will gain exposure to authentic medical challenges from the outset,” said Suman Chakraborty, director of IIT Kharagpur.
“This living lab will serve as a source of practical data and will function in two ways: provide practical data for human resource training and create simulations, such as surgery simulations or disease modeling that are connected to real-life data. Faculty from BC Roy Institute of Medical Sciences will teach foundational clinical sciences, while the institute’s super-speciality hospital will serve as a continuous site for immersion, observation and co-creation,” Chakraborty said.
Professor Manjunatha Mahadevappa of SMST said students will be trained across frontier domains — AI in medicine, medical devices, robotics, biomedical imaging and signal processing, tissue engineering, immunology, modelling and simulation — so they can develop an integrated approach to solving human health problems.
According to Chakraborty, most biomedical engineering courses in India are taught as purely academic topics and lack a strong clinical connection and integration of technology with real-world applications.
“With this programme, IIT Kharagpur is setting the template for how engineering institutions can meaningfully partner with medicine to transform education, innovation and healthcare delivery at national and global scales. We envision our students as a new generation of specialised workforce for futuristic healthcare.”
The institute has already received significant investments to set up modernised laboratories and integrated prototyping facilities.
“New faculty is being recruited to ensure that the programme launches with ambition and depth,” Chakraborty said.
