Pathway from medical physics to biomedical engineering?

[thehiddenphysicist]

Throughout this forum, I've seen numerous posts discussing the transition to medical physics. However, I'm curious to learn about what advice can be shared on having an interest to work in biomedical engineering with a background/ experience as a medical physics.

Would this entail completing a few or many courses to obtain a biomedical eng. degree?

If having such a degree is unnecessary, how would one go about acquiring a non-research/ industry position in this field?

 

[jedishrfu]

You can check some companies that are looking for BME folks and see if what you know is competitive and of interest to them.

My suspicion is that you will need some engineering courses to complement what you know already. However, you'd need to check with a school that has a BME program to be sure.

 

[Choppy]

BME is pretty broad. A lot depends on what you want to do, and what you've done in medical physics. For example a lot of biomedical engineers work in MRI and there's a lot of overlap with medical physics there... or at least there can be. In fact most of the MRI medical physicists I know started out in biomedical engineering.

If on the other hand you wanted to get into a branch of biomedical engineering that tends not to overlap too much with medical physics, say soft robotics, then there's probably a lot more re-tooling involved.