Biomedical engineering, medical imaging and virtual surgery are having an enormous impact on health care and surgical training. Almost all aspects of medicine are being enhanced by interactive computer-based technologies. Biomedical engineers are increasingly being involved with the development of novel, reliable, noninvasive technologies for the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of diseases. For examples, medical electronic devices and biosensors improve home/mobile healthcare; microarray technologies offer immense potential for studying the whole cellular transactions; imaging tools enhance diagnosis; robotic devices facilitate surgery and rehabilitation; visualization and virtual reality provide excellent means for surgery training and planning.

Since 1999, the Biomedicine research teams in the Faculty of Engineering have acquired more than HK$35 million form Hong Kong Research Grants Council and Innovation and Technology Fund in related research areas. Highly functional prototypes including virtual bronchoscopy, virtual acupuncture, virtual arthroscopy, as well as a web-based scoliosis clinical multimedia database have been developed in clinical use at Prince of Wales Hospital. There is also a very strong and productive collaboration among the engineering and medicine faculties at CUHK in the area of biomedical engineering and computer assisted medicine.

One of the significant projects is the Chinese Visible Human Project, in which several ultra-high resolution digital human datasets were collected within the last two years. The team succeeded in handling massive image processing, 3D reconstruction as well as developed the world fastest photo-realistic volume visualization tools to support stereoscopic rendering of these gigantic digital human datasets.