Tianjin University will initiate China's first undergraduate intelligence-oriented medical program, approved by the Education Ministry on March 21, and will start recruiting students in the autumn semester.

This program is expected to recruit about 30 undergraduate students for the Autumn Semester of 2018. The recruited students will be jointly trained by Tianjin University and Tianjin Medical University, and will receive graduation certificates issued by the two universities. The students will obtain double degrees in medicine and engineering. Outstanding students will get the chance to enter the undergraduate-master-doctor integration training system and obtain a medicine or engineering doctorate.

The establishment of the Intelligent Medical Engineering program marks Tianjin University’s substantive advancement in integrating medicine program and engineering programs and the further improvement of the disciplinary format by consolidating engineering, strengthening science, revitalizing humanities and developing medicine. Moreover, it signifies that Tianjin University has reached a new stage in the course of developing a world-class university and first-class disciplines.

With the closer combination of health-related fields and new technologies such as artificial intelligence, robots, and big data, modern medical models are facing major changes and intelligent medical science is becoming a leading force in innovation-driven health undertakings. And it is urgent to cultivate a batch of leading inter-disciplinary medical experts with outstanding cross-disciplinary, innovative and practical abilities in related fields to lead future medical development, especially as the potential of intelligent medical services for medical health industry is enormous. New intelligent medical technologies and products represented by Dr. Watson, Leonardo's Robot, etc. are in the ascendant. And the future global market space is expected to exceed hundreds of billions in order of magnitude. Moreover, talented people with both medicine and engineering backgrounds are in great demand.

TJU distinguished Professor Gu Xiaosong, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, is in charge of the Intelligent Medical Engineering program. He believes that many clinical diagnoses and treatments need the fundamental support of engineering. In China, as medical education and engineering education belong to different categories and are always on parallel tracks, it is difficult to develop true inter-disciplines. Furthermore, the research of emerging disciplines has always been a weak link in China's medical science and technology innovation chain. The establishment of the Intelligent Medical Engineering program is a blueprint for the integration of medicine and engineering, and laying out the future of innovation in the field of intelligent medicine, and thus improving the future levels of health care.

From the viewpoint of TJU President Zhong Denghua, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Intelligent Medical Engineering program is a beneficial exploration of the comprehensive reform of new medical science and new engineering education. Modern higher education aims to cultivate diversified and innovative talent and provide intellectual and talent support for the future. Its characteristics are strategic, innovative, systematic, and open. The establishment of the Intelligent Medical Engineering program is a multidisciplinary fusion as well as a boundary crossing, which can promote the organic integration of medical, engineering, science, and humanistic education. Furthermore, it is conducive to fostering advanced medicine-engineering talent and top innovative medical talent who have a love for home and the Motherland, an international perspective and are conscious of the law, ecological issues, engineering ethics, and humanistic care.

Ming Dong, who enrolled as a biomedical engineering major undergraduate of Tianjin University in 1994, is currently the Director of TJU Medicine Construction Office and the Dean of the Institute of Medical Engineering and Translational Medicine. He holds the view that starting from the joint establishment of biomedical engineering program, the two universities have shared the same roots and cooperated with each other closely. The new Intelligent Medical Engineering program is expected to further integrate and optimize existing resources and achieve a nonlinear incremental effect of “1+1>2”. In the next step, the two sides will carry out all-round and multi-level cooperation in discipline construction, scientific research, talent training, and international exchange with a view to achieving a win-win result.

Tianjin University and Tianjin Medical University took the lead in setting up the Intelligent Medical Engineering program in China. The program relies on the Medical Science and Technology College co-established by the two universities, and is oriented to the integration of cutting-edge technology and clinical medicine. It aims to foster high-quality combined intelligent engineering and medical talent with a medical background, intelligent technology foundation, and clinical practice ability. Students in this field must not only be familiar with medical knowledge, but also master intelligent engineering courses, which ensures that they will be equipped with the ability to utilize cutting-edge engineering techniques to solve medical problems after graduation.

The cooperation between Tianjin University and Tianjin Medical University can be traced back to 1978. Li Shusen, then president of Tianjin University, and Zhu Xianyi, Dean of Tianjin Medical College (predecessor of Tianjin Medical University), reached a consensus on the development trends of the world's science and technology frontiers. With sensitivity as scientists and determination as educators, they decided to co-establish the earliest biomedical engineering program in China. This made Tianjin University one of the first batch of universities to establish this program in China and pioneer medicine and engineering integration. At that time, the biomedical engineering program applied the model of joint recruitment and cooperative training. Elite teachers were transferred from Tianjin Medical College to design a medical curriculum system for biomedical engineering majors. This tradition extends to today's the Intelligent Medical Engineering program forty years later. It is a historical coincidence and an inevitable development trend that the two universities join hands again and set up China’s first Intelligent Medical Engineering program.

The integration of medicine and engineering has always been the unremitting goal of Tianjin University as well as its predecessor Peiyang University. In history, there have been several attempts and plans to set up medical science. In 1937, Li Shutian, then President of Peiyang Institute of Technology, put forward the establishment of a Medical College and Institute of Medicine when preparing for the reconstruction of Peiyang University. Eighty years later in 2017, the renamed “Tianjin Hospital, Tianjin University" (Tianjin Hospital) and the "School of Medical Science and Technology" jointly established the Tianjin Medical University that not only initiated university-hospital collaboration and medicine-engineering integration, but also symbolized that TJU medical science development has entered a new stage on that journey. Moreover, it laid a solid foundation for the comprehensive development pattern of Tianjin University as "a world-class university with Chinese characteristics." Going forward, Tianjin University will integrate top-level talent resources and industrial resources from both inside and outside the university, actively create conditions for the training of intelligent medical engineering professionals, and strive to create a TJU characteristic development path featuring medical traction, engineering support, transformation and innovation, and clinical demonstration.