Advances in addressing technical challenges of point-of-care diagnostics in resource-limited settings.

Expert Rev Mol Diagn

d The Bio-Acoustic MEMS in Medicine (BAMM) Laboratory, Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection, Department of Radiology , Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford University, Palo Alto , CA , USA.

Published: December 2016

The striking prevalence of HIV, TB and malaria, as well as outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases, such as influenza A (H7N9), Ebola and MERS, poses great challenges for patient care in resource-limited settings (RLS). However, advanced diagnostic technologies cannot be implemented in RLS largely due to economic constraints. Simple and inexpensive point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, which rely less on environmental context and operator training, have thus been extensively studied to achieve early diagnosis and treatment monitoring in non-laboratory settings. Despite great input from material science, biomedical engineering and nanotechnology for developing POC diagnostics, significant technical challenges are yet to be overcome. Summarized here are the technical challenges associated with POC diagnostics from a RLS perspective and the latest advances in addressing these challenges are reviewed.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4943866PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1586/14737159.2016.1142877DOI Listing

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