Microfluidic-based point-of-care testing for disease diagnosis

Abstract

The early detection of diseases is important to optimize clinical treatment. To meet the increasing requirement of rapid medical diagnosis, point-of-care testing (POCT) has drawn scientists’ great attention for its outstanding advantages including simple, efficient, inexpensive and instrument-independent. Recent advantages of microfluidic-based diagnosis have played an important role in the significant technological process of POCT, which can achieve rapid diagnosis and provide high precision testing results for correct clinical decision making. This review focuses on design strategies, detection targets and sensing mechanisms of recent microfluidic-based POCT for disease diagnosis. Further, we provide a perspective of the next generation of POCT devices and their future opportunities.