Dr. Kaplan has established and directed this exceptionally highly rated graduate course in clinical electrophysiology over 6 semesters at Rutgers, the State University of NJ.
Kaplan has over a decade of experience teaching applied clinical electrophysiology. He developed this course based on the real-world format pioneered by, and with the guidance of, Gerald E. Loeb, MD at the University of Southern California.
This course provides the theoretical basis and applied design principles for medical devices and instrumentation that interact with all the electrically excitable tissues of the body.
Each week a new electrophysiological system is explored (e.g., cardiac muscle, skeletal muscle, the central and peripheral nervous systems involved in sensing, control of movement, control of autonomic functions, etc.); together with its related electrodiagnostic and electrotherapeutic technologies (e.g., pacemakers, defibrillators, cochlear implants, retinal implants, epidural stimulators, transcutaneous electrical stimulators, neuromuscular stimulators, electrocardiography, electromyography, electrooculography, electroencephalography, etc.)
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The course is based on Dr. Kaplan's real-life experience as a physician, in industry, and as an instructor in applied electrophysiology for over a decade. It is therefore designed to follow a real-world, industry-like environment: Students arrive well-read and prepared for a detailed Socratic-styled discussion around a particular problem (during the seminars/lectures); followed by proposing hypotheses, designing and conducting experiments to investigate these, and finally documenting their findings (during the labs). Readings are therefore essential, but there is no traditional "homework."
The topic of each lab is keyed to the preceding seminar. Students work in teams of 2-5, each with a BioRadio™ system. These wearable, Bluetooth wireless, biomedical monitors have 8 programmable channels for recording and transmitting a wide variety of human physiological signals. Data is captured for analysis in MATLAB®, integration with LabVIEW™, etc. There are no set "cookbook" experiments. Rather, following the weekly seminar each team identifies a particular question they wish to explore; and then designs and executes their experiments in the upcoming lab, documenting the objectives, methods and outcomes in their lab notebooks. At the beginning of each lab, teams share their hypotheses verbally with each other; and at the end, they summarize their findings with each other.