Medical engineering combines the design and problem-solving skills of engineering with medical and biological sciences to contribute to medical device solutions and interventions for a range of diseases and trauma.
This exciting and challenging programme will give you a broad knowledge base in this rapidly expanding field, as well as allowing you to specialise through your choice of optional modules.
We emphasise the multidisciplinary nature of medical engineering and the current shift towards the interface between engineering and the life sciences. You could focus on tissue engineering, biomaterials or joint replacement technology among a host of other topics.
Whether you’re an engineer or surgeon, or you work in sales, marketing or regulation, you’ll gain the knowledge and skills to launch or develop your career in this demanding sector.
Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering
You’ll learn in an exciting research environment where breakthroughs are being made in your discipline. This programme is closely linked to our Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (IMBE), which focuses on research and education in the fields of medical devices and regenerative medicine. It focuses on innovating and translating new therapies into practical clinical applications.
Our world-class facilities in materials screening analysis, joint simulation, surface analysis, heart valve simulation and tensile and fatigue testing allow us to push the boundaries in medical engineering.
This course is accredited by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) under licence from the UK regulator, the Engineering Council.
One core module in Semester 1 will give you a background in experimental design and analysis within medical engineering. You’ll look at computational and biological methodologies alongside statistical data analysis and different data visualisation techniques to lay the foundations of your studies.
Optional modules in each semester will allow you to build on this knowledge and focus on specialist topics that suit your own interests and career intentions. You could focus on biomechatronics and medical robotics, spinal biomechanics, surface engineering or computational fluid dynamics analysis and a range of other topics. Depending on your academic or professional background, you may decide to take introductory modules such as Basic Orthopaedic Engineering or Structure and Function of the Body to fill the gaps in your knowledge.
Throughout the programme you’ll complete your Professional Project – an independent piece of research on a topic within mechanical engineering that allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and skills. In the two taught semesters you’ll review the literature around your topic and plan the project, before completing the design, analysis, computation, experimentation and writing up in the summer months.
If you choose to study part-time, you’ll extend your studies over a longer period so you can take fewer modules in each year.
Want to find out more about your modules?
Take a look at the Medical Engineering module descriptions for more detail on what you will study.
Compulsory modules
Optional modules
Our groundbreaking research feeds directly into teaching, and you’ll have regular interactions with staff who are at the forefront of their disciplines. You’ll have regular contact with them through lectures, seminars, tutorials, small group work and project meetings. Some modules make use of online learning methods or a short course format.
Independent study is also important to the programme, as you develop your problem-solving and research skills as well as your subject knowledge.
You’ll be assessed using a range of techniques including case studies, technical reports, presentations, in-class tests, assignments and exams. Optional modules may also use alternative assessment methods.
The professional project is one of the most satisfying elements of this course. It allows you to apply what you’ve learned to a piece of research focusing on a real-world problem, and it can be used to explore and develop your specific interests.
Recent projects for MSc Medical Engineering students have included:
Career destinations are diverse and include medical engineering within industrial or public sector organisations, regulatory affairs and sales and marketing.
Graduates from this programme have gone on to work in a range of roles for employers such as the clinical research centres, continued in a career in clinical orthopaedics, progressed to a PhD programme.
You’ll also be well prepared to continue with engineering research, whether in industry or at PhD level.
You’ll have access to the wide range of engineering and computing careers resources held by our Employability team in our dedicated Employability Suite. You’ll have the chance to attend industry presentations book appointments with qualified careers consultants and take part in employability workshops. Our annual Engineering and Computing Careers Fairs provide further opportunities to explore your career options with some of the UK's leading employers.
The University's Careers Centre also provide a range of help and advice to help you plan your career and make well-informed decisions along the way, even after you graduate. Find out more at the Careers website
Mechatronics, robotics and autonomous systems represent a range of important technologies which underpin many applications – from manufacturing and automation through to self-driving cars and robotic surgical tools.
Delivered by the Schools of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computing, this programme will equip you with the specialist knowledge and wide range of skills to pursue a career in this dynamic field.
Core modules will give you a foundation in the many applications of mechatronics and robotics and develop your understanding of the wide range of industry sectors that use robotics. You’ll also build research skills with a major project in fields as diverse as robot swarms, sensing systems, bio-inspired robots and surgical robotics.
Diverse optional modules will allow you to focus on topics that suit your interests and career plans, guided by academics whose teaching is informed by their own world-class research.
Specialist facilities
The Faculty of Engineering is an exciting and stimulating environment where you’ll learn in specialist facilities. These include an ABB robotic manufacturing cell, the Embedded Systems Lab, the Keysight Technologies Communications Lab, the National Instruments LabVIEW Academy, and computer clusters with a very wide range of industry-standard CAD/CAE/CAM software packages.
The three Schools that deliver this programme collaborate in research projects within the themes of surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, exploration robotics and future cities.
Three core modules act as the foundations of the course, developing your understanding of key aspects of mechatronics and robotics and how they fit into the context of the full range of industrial sectors and rapidly-developing everyday applications.
Mechatronics and Robotics Applications will look at the challenges, problems and solutions involved in integrating components such as actuators and computer control into modern engineering systems in domains such as healthcare and the automotive industry.
To build your understanding of the global industry and career opportunities, you’ll also complete a dissertation in a topic of your choice. This is supported by a series of lectures that cover the principles of globalisation, industry sectors, manufacturing, business models, teamwork skills and entrepreneurship. This could take the form of a business, manufacturing or outsourcing plan, a proposal for research funding or an essay on a specific aspect of the industry.
Over the summer months you’ll also work on your research project. This gives you the chance to work on a project allied to one of our research groups, spanning an exceptionally wide range of areas ranging from computer vision and artificial intelligence through robotic communications, sensing and embedded systems to mechanical design, industrial inspection, biomedical engineering and surgical robotics.
You’ll complete your studies by selecting from a range of optional modules that allow you to focus on topics that suit your personal interests or career intentions. You could build your understanding of computational methods, medical robotics, control systems design and more.
Want to find out more about your modules?
Take a look at the Mechatronics and Robotics module descriptions for more detail on what you will study.
Compulsory modules
Optional modules
Our groundbreaking research feeds directly into teaching, and you’ll have regular contact with staff who are at the forefront of their disciplines. You’ll have regular contact with them through lectures, seminars, tutorials, small group work and project meetings. Independent study is also important to the programme, as you develop your problem-solving and research skills as well as your subject knowledge.
You’ll be assessed using a range of techniques including case studies, technical reports, presentations, in-class tests, assignments and exams. Optional modules may also use alternative assessment methods.
Mechatronics and robotics is a multidisciplinary field with a strong future, exciting career opportunities and a huge range of applications in robotics, manufacturing, automation, automotive engineering, aerospace, healthcare and medicine, leisure & entertainment and many more.
After graduating from this course, you will be in a good position to seek employment as a development, project or graduate engineer with leading organisations such as GCHQ, JN Bentley, Oilger Towler Ltd, Airbus UK, Avesta, Crosslee Plc, ABB Ltd, AWE, Ricardo, APV Baker, Jaguar Land Rover and Jacobs Engineering.
You’ll have access to the wide range of engineering and computing careers resources held by our Employability team in our dedicated Employability Suite. You’ll have the chance to attend industry presentations book appointments with qualified careers consultants and take part in employability workshops. Our annual Engineering and Computing Careers Fairs provide further opportunities to explore your career options with some of the UK’s leading employers.
The University's Careers Centre also provide a range of help and advice to help you plan your career and make well-informed decisions along the way, even after you graduate. Find out more at the Careers website.
Robots have the potential to revolutionise society and the economy, working for us, beside us, and interacting with us. This EPSRC-sponsored programme will produce graduates with the technical skills and industry awareness to create an innovation pipeline from academic research to global markets.
The robotics and autonomous systems area has been highlighted by the UK Government in 2013 as one of the eight Great Technologies that underpin the UK's Industrial Strategy for jobs and growth. Key application areas include manufacturing, assistive and medical robots, offshore energy, environmental monitoring, search and rescue, defence, and support for the ageing population.
The University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University are jointly offering this innovative four-year PhD training programme, which combines a strong general grounding in current theory, methods and applications with flexibility for individualised study and a specialised PhD project.
Robotics and autonomous systems are increasingly studied beyond the range of classical engineering. Today robots represent one of the main areas of application of computer science and provide challenges for mathematics and natural science.
It is impossible to imagine transportation, warehousing, safety systems, space and marine exploration, prosthetics, and many other areas of industry, technology and science without robots. Robots are used in theoretical biology and the neurosciences as a model of behaviour.
Areas of interest specific to the center include: movement control, planning, decision making, bio- and neurorobotics, human-robot interaction, healthcare applications, robot soccer, neuroprosthetics, underwater robotics, bipedal walking, service robots, robotic co-workers, computer vision, speech processing, computer animation realistic simulations, and machine learning.
Many more topics can be found be exploring the Centre’s web pages, particularly the personal web pages of the Centre supervisors:
Our four-year PhD programme combines Masters level coursework and project work with independent PhD-level research.
In the first year, you will undertake four or five masters level courses, spread throughout robotics, machine learning, computational neuroscience, computer architectures, statistics, optimization, sensorics, dynamics, mechanics, image processing, signal processing, modelling, animation, artificial intelligence, and related areas. You will also undertake a significant introductory research project. (Students with previous masters-level work in these areas may request to take less courses and a larger project.)
At the end of the first year, successful students will be awarded an MSc by Research by the University of Edinburgh. From this basis, the subsequent three years will be spent developing and pursuing a PhD research project, under the close supervision of your primary and secondary supervisors. The PhD will be awarded jointly by the University of Edinburgh and the Heriot-Watt University.
You will have opportunities for three to six month internships with leading companies in your area, and to participate in our industrial engagement programme, exchanging ideas and challenges with our sponsor companies.
Throughout your studies, you will participate in our regular programmes of seminars, short talks and brainstorming sessions, and benefit from our pastoral mentoring schemes.
Our user partners in industry include companies working in offshore energy, environmental monitoring, defence, assisted living, transport, advanced manufacturing and education. They will provide the real world context for research, as well as opportunities for reciprocal secondments, internships and involvement in our industrial engagement programme.
The School of Informatics holds a Silver Athena SWAN award, in recognition of our commitment to advance the representation of women in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. The School is deploying a range of strategies to help female staff and students of all stages in their careers and we seek regular feedback from our research community on our performance.
You will have access to the outstanding facilities in the Edinburgh Robotarium, a national facility for research into robot interaction, supporting the research of more than 50 world-leading investigators from 17 cross-disciplinary research groups.
Research groups at the Edinburgh Robotarium include humanoid movement control, underwater, land and airborne autonomous vehicles, human robot interaction, bio- and neuro-robotics, and planning and decision making in multirobot scenarios.
In addition, our research groups contain a diverse range of compute clusters for compute and data-intensive work, including a large cluster hosted by the Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility.
Our aim is to produce innovation-ready graduates who are skilled in the principles of technical and commercial disruption and who understand how finance and organisation realise new products in start-up, SME and corporate situations.
We intend for our graduates to become leaders in the globally emerging market for autonomous and robotic systems that reduce risk, reduce cost, increase profit and protect the environment. This vision is shared by our industrial supporters, whose support for our internship programme indicates their strong desire to find highly qualified new employees.
Our component research groups already have excellent track-records in post-graduation destinations, including the research labs of industry-leading companies, and post-doctoral research positions in top tier universities.
This degree provides in-depth training for students interested in a career in industry or in research-oriented institutions focused on image and video analysis, and deep learning.
State-of-the-art computer-vision and machine-learning approaches for image and video analysis are covered in the course, as well as low-level image processing methods.
Students also have the chance to substantially expand their programming skills through projects they undertake.
Read about the experience of a previous student on this course, Gianmarco Addari.
This programme is studied full-time over 12 months and part-time from 24 to 60 months. It consists of eight taught modules and a standard project.
Example module listing
The following modules are indicative, reflecting the information available at the time of publication. Please note that not all modules described are compulsory and may be subject to teaching availability and/or student demand.
This programme in Computer Vision, Robotics and Machine Learning aims to provide a high-quality advanced training in aspects of computer vision for extracting information from image and video content or enhancing its visual quality using machine learning codes.
Computer vision technology uses sophisticated signal processing and data analysis methods to support access to visual information, whether it is for business, security, personal use or entertainment.
The core modules cover the fundamentals of how to represent image and video information digitally, including processing, filtering and feature extraction techniques.
An important aspect of the programme is the software implementation of such processes. Students will be able to tailor their learning experience through selection of elective modules to suit their career aspirations.
Key to the programme is cross-linking between core methods and systems for image and video analysis applications. The programme has strong links to current research in the Department of Electronic Engineering’s Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing.
To support your learning, we hold regular MSc group meetings where any aspect of the programme, technical or non-technical, can be discussed in an informal atmosphere. This allows you to raise any problems that you would like to have addressed and encourages peer-based learning and general group discussion.
We provide computing support with any specialised software required during the programme, for example, Matlab. The Faculty’s student common room is also covered by the University’s open-access wireless network, which makes it a very popular location for individual and group work using laptops and mobile devices.
Specialist experimental and research facilities, for computationally demanding projects or those requiring specialist equipment, are provided by the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP).
Computer vision specialists are be valuable in all industries that require intelligent processing and interpretation of image and video. This includes industries in directly related fields such as:
Studying for Msc degree in Computer Vision offers variety, challenge and stimulation. It is not just the introduction to a rewarding career, but also offers an intellectually demanding and exciting opportunity to break through boundaries in research.
Many of the most remarkable advancements in the past 60 years have only been possible through the curiosity and ingenuity of engineers. Our graduates have a consistently strong record of gaining employment with leading companies.
Employers value the skills and experience that enable our graduates to make a positive contribution in their jobs from day one.
We draw on our industry experience to inform and enrich our teaching, bringing theoretical subjects to life. Our industrial collaborations include:
This course gives an excellent preparation for continuing onto PhD studies in computer vision related domains.
We often give our students the opportunity to acquire international experience during their degrees by taking advantage of our exchange agreements with overseas universities.
In addition to the hugely enjoyable and satisfying experience, time spent abroad adds a distinctive element to your CV.
