IMT Atlantique and the University of Western Brittany (UBO) are launching a double degree aimed at preparing doctors for the medical challenges of the future. This new course offers students from the University of Western Brittany's Medicine Faculty the opportunity to obtain an engineering degree from IMT Atlantique in parallel with their medical studies. They will thus acquire the scientific and technical skills that are essential in the fields that will impact medicine in the future.
More than other sectors, medicine is undergoing profound changes thanks to technological innovation and the development of digital tools. This double degree, created, in partnership, by IMT Atlantique and the UFR Medicine faculty of the University of Western Brittany, aims to train high-level doctors who have the necessary skills in the field of health technologies and who wish to move into the medical engineering field. This hybrid profile of doctor-engineer is in very high demand, both from the health industry and from the 600 companies in the Health Tech sector in France involved in the digital and technological revolutions in health (3D printing, AI and Big Data, connected objects, robotics, augmented reality, etc).
Acquire a dual competence in medicine and engineering
This course is open to DFGSM2 students (in their 2nd year of the Degree in Medical Sciences). Successful candidates follow an intensive refresher course in mathematics, physics and computer science - 125 hours per year divided between classroom courses at UFR Sciences and e-learning - in parallel with their medical studies. - They then enter the engineering programme for a year of alternating courses, two days a week at the UFR Médecine and three days at IMT Atlantique, during which they study Health Engineering (medical devices and sensors, digital patients, computer-assisted medical and surgical procedures, medical imaging for diagnostic exploration and therapeutic follow-up, as well as connected medical devices) and also complete a four-week internship. The following year is spent in total immersion. Freed from the medical courses and internships, the students then enter the final year of the IMT Atlantique engineering cycle full time, before returning to their medical training and submitting their thesis. Although this dual course lasts three years, it extends the traditional medical curriculum by a single year.
Begun at the beginning of this school year, the double degree course has welcomed 4 students to the course, an intake which is expected to develop considerably. Such a double degree course between a faculty of medicine and a school of engineering is rare in France, and meets a real need in the health sector.
by Pierre-Hervé VAILLANT
