DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40883-017-0039-6

Summary
The article is focused on the importance of synergy between biomedical engineering and the medicine studies. This enables future physicians and biomedical engineers to predict the clinical responses to therapeutic interventions, consider governing parameters to achieve the desirable clinical outcomes. Firstly, the authors describe the modern practice of medicine and its relation to engineering and complex system behavior. Secondly, they review the recent medical education approaches, the preferable competencies and knowledge obtained during the studies, including the quantitative knowledge and reasoning that leads to applying informatics tools to make clinical decisions. Thirdly, they discuss the combination of medicine and biomedical engineering and provide several course themes to illustrate the synergy of both disciplines, for example, adipocyte leptin regulation by insulin in case of metabolic syndrome. Finally, they conclude that the partnership between the medical and engineering schools is beneficial as it facilitates communication between those who create biomedical technology and those who use it.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The authors define the idea of systems thinking in the personalized medicine by encouraging students to use technologies and engineering pedagogy to develop systems thinking to analyze health and disease. Mimicking biological systems, developing disease simulator algorithms can help students to understand complex, self-arranged, multi-parameter systems. The engineering skills are recognized as an important part in medical education as reasoning and data analysis, modelling and usage of informatics tools are necessary competences in solving real life problems. The authors describe how biomedical engineering course can be improved by analyzing a semester-long theme and the teaching strategy which consists of providing students target material and corresponding instructions. This results in gaining knowledge and skills to contextualize appropriate biological questions, develop and analyze an appropriate mode. The similar approach in the education of medical students enables to develop skills to analyze complex systems and formulate the perspective on the person-by-person basis. The authors provide several examples of course themes.
The idea of the personalized medicine defines a complex system by itself as knowledge in medicine, biology, information technology is necessary.

Point of Strength
The article describes the importance of system thinking in the field of personalized medicine and the integration of medical knowledge (biology, chemistry) and engineering (applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, material science).