Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is Waterloo’s largest academic department, with over 2,500 students, 93 full-time faculty members and 50 support staff. In addition to offering undergraduate and graduate programs in electrical engineering and computer engineering, ECE provides academic expertise and support to Waterloo’s multidisciplinary mechatronics, nanotechnology, and software engineering programs.
ECE’s research activities cover a wide range of fields, from high-voltage engineering and sustainable energy to breakthroughs in wireless technology that will enhance communications across our global society. The biomedical research area covers several sub-areas across the department including nanotechnology, silicon devices and integrated circuits, circuits and systems, computer software, communications and information systems, pattern analysis and machine intelligence, systems and controls, wireless communications, and antennas, microwaves and wave optics.
Our research interests are diverse, and currently include: biomedical ultrasound imaging and therapy, medical diagnostic X-ray imagers, medical image processing (denoising, registration, segmentation, restoration, etc.), medical image analysis (object detection and tracking, automatic diagnosis), telemedicine (real-time transmission of image/video), linear stochastic systems, human motion analysis, machine learning, human-robot interaction, MEMS/MOEMS, CMOS integration, Lab-on-chip devices and medical diagnostics, biocompatibility of patterned metals, circuits for implantable neural recording systems, nonlinear systems, optimal lossy and lossless data compression algorithms, bioelectromagnetics, and robotics.
ECE’s Laboratory on Innovative Technology in Medical Ultrasound (LITMUS) works closely with the Schlegel-UW Research Institute for Aging, Ontario’s first purpose-built teaching long-term care home with a 192-bed capacity. LITMUS has significant plans in the near future to expand their research infrastructure capacity in advanced ultrasound imaging innovations and therapeutic ultrasound discoveries. As part of this plan, ECE intends to acquire a research-purpose ultrasound array scanner for dynamic ultrasound imaging investigations.
