This book is a tribute to Professor Yuan-Cheng Fung, the Father of Biomechanics and a pioneer in Bioengineering, in honor of his 90th Birthday. The book consists of articles contributed by his colleagues, students, friends and family. These articles illustrate Professor Fung's profound influence on outstanding leaders in bioengineering, especially biomechanics, and on the life and work of all people who have been in contact with him. The scientific topics covered range from fundamentals of science and engineering (e.g., residual stress, flow dynamics, and cellular signaling) to clinical disorders (e.g., atherosclerosis, diabetes, and hypertension). The articles cover the whole spectrum of biological hierarchy, from genes/molecules to cells/tissues, and organs/systems, with close correlations between engineering and biomedical sciences. This book provides an excellent view of the marvelous contributions of Professor Fung as a Renaissance Man.

New Frontiers in Biomedical Engineering will be an edited work taken from the 1st Annual World Congress of Chinese Biomedical Engineers - Taipei, Taiwan 2002. As the economy develops rapidly in China and the Asian-Pacific population merges into the global healthcare system, many researchers in the West are trying to make contact with the Chinese BME scientists. At WCCBME 2002, invited leaders, materials scientists, bioengineers, molecular and cellular biologists, orthopaedic surgeons, and manufacturers from P.R. of China, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong covered all five major BME domains: biomechanics, biomaterials and tissue engineering, medical imaging, biophotonics and instrumentation, and rehabilitation. This edited work taken from the World Congress proceedings will capture worldwide readership.

Clinical biomechanics is a rapidly changing field with an increasingly wide appeal. While the core subjects of biomechanics remain the behavior of bones, joints, ligaments, and muscles, this book focuses on more clinical aspects such as artificial joints, tissue transplantations, and the effects of disease on biomechanical properties. Also featured are special studies of the hand, spine, vascular system, and the analysis of three-dimensional motion.
Based on the 20th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Clinical Biomechanics and Related Research, this book provides an overview of the subject as well as describing many exciting new concepts and innovative methods for analyzing biomechanical systems. It should appeal across a wide spectrum of professions, proving indispensable to everyone from orthopedic surgeons to engineers with an interest in biology.

The picture on the front cover of this book depicts a young man pulling a fishnet, a task of practical relevance for many centuries. It is a complex task, involving load transmission throughout the body, intricate balance, and eye head-hand coordination. The quest toward understanding how we perform such tasks with skill and grace, often in the presence of unpredictable pertur bations, has a long history. However, despite a history of magnificent sculptures and drawings of the human body which vividly depict muscle ac tivity and interaction, until more recent times our state of knowledge of human movement was rather primitive. During the past century this has changed; we now have developed a considerable database regarding the com position and basic properties of muscle and nerve tissue and the basic causal relations between neural function and biomechanical movement. Over the last few decades we have also seen an increased appreciation of the impor tance of musculoskeletal biomechanics: the neuromotor system must control movement within a world governed by mechanical laws. We have now col lected quantitative data for a wealth of human movements. Our capacity to understand the data we collect has been enhanced by our continually evolving modeling capabilities and by the availability of computational power. What have we learned? This book is designed to help synthesize our current knowledge regarding the role of muscles in human movement. The study of human movement is not a mature discipline."

Historical folklore indicates that Asldepios (circa 900 BC), the fIrst western doctor of ancient Greece, treated many patients with rheumatic diseases of 1 joints ,2. Later, Hippocrates (circa 400 BC), who claimed to have learned from Asklepios, used the term arthritis in reference to joint diseases: "When the disease of arthritis strikes, acute inflammation and pain attacks the joints of the body ... ". Indeed, arthritic joint disease dates much farther back into antiquity than Asklepios. Many modern anthropologists have noted degenerative joint disease in the fossils of Neanderthal man (archanthropus europeus petraloniensis) and even in those of dinosaurs. More recent scientific studies on joints date back to the work of the great English anatomist Hunter who wrote "The Structure and Diseases of Articular Cartilage" in the Philosophical Transactions of London in 1743. The notion that osteoarthritis results from the wearing away of cartilage was copiously documented by the histological observations of the German physician Ecker in 1843. This idea was further supported by Pommer (1927) who felt that mechanical stresses played important roles in the initiation and propagation of cartilage lesions leading to osteoarthritis. This same conclusion was reached by the assembled distinguished experts at a National Institutes of Health Workshop 3 held in 1986 .

Historical folklore indicates that Asklepios (circa 900 BC), the fir~t western doctor of ancient Greece, treated many patients with rheumatic diseases of 1 joints ,2. Later, Hippocrates (circa 400 BC), who claimed to have learned from Asklepios, used the term arthritis in reference to joint diseases: "When the disease of arthritis strikes, acute inflammation and pain attacks the joints of the body ... ". Indeed, arthritic joint disease dates much farther back into antiquity than Asklepios. Many modern anthropologists have noted degenerative joint disease in the fossils of Neanderthal man (archanthropus europeus petraloniensis) and even in those of dinosaurs. More recent scientific studies on joints date back to the work of the great English anatomist Hunter who wrote "The Structure and Diseases of Articular Cartilage" in the Philosophical Transactions of London in 1743. The notion that osteoarthritis results from the wearing away of cartilage was copiously documented by the histological observations of the German physician Ecker in 1843. This idea was further supported by Pommer (1927) who felt that mechanical stresses played important roles in the initiation and propagation of cartilage lesions leading to osteoarthritis. This same conclusion was reached by the assembled distinguished experts at a National Institutes of Health Workshop 3 held in 1986 .