Tought provoking
This book is the second volume in the "Detection Science" Series, edited by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Herein, leading academic researchers and clinical practitioners are bringing the reader up to date with the fast evolving diagnostics needs.
The editors' intent was to keep the focus on the bottlenecks or challenges when ?dealing with the world of real biological measurement ? especially from the perspective of a commonly neglected expert: the end user.? Indeed, I found this to be a thought-provoking book, quite fun to read, with each chapter offering a fresh view of the state of the art and related future challenges for the future of specific chemical sensors and clinical diagnostics.
Following a logical progression, this book looks at the big picture of the clinical diagnostics both in laboratory and bedside, continues with the blood glucose sensors, followed by the disease diagnostics biomarkers and then dives into more challenges form the different case studies of: the implanted sensor long-term biocompatibility, the quantification of peroxynitrite as an important nitro-oxidative species, the ?classification? of patients at risk for myelodysplastic syndrome, the early cancer diagnosis via fiber-optic Raman interrogation, and the complex signal handling with arrays.
More specifically, Thompson et al and Vadgama et al offer an outline the Clinical Diagnostics, both in the laboratory and at the bedside, in Chapter 1 and 2, respectively. The progress and challenges of the blood glucose biosensors is illustrated by Wang and Hu in Chapter 3. Gaspar et al. offers in Chapter 4 a critical overview of the recent progress and many challenges in electrochemical detection of disease-related diagnostic biomarkers. Meyerhoff et al. is focusing in Chapter 5 on the challenges of long-term biocompatibility for the implanted sensors. The case of short-lived radical species, such as peroxynitrite, is featured in Chapter 6 by Peteu and Szunerits, with the significant difficulties of measurement in vivo. The myelodysplastic syndromes is illustrated in Chapter 7 by McNamara et al., with its major challenge: how to correctly classify and ?risk stratify? the patients. Barr et al. report in Chapter 8 on Raman for non-invasive early cancer diagnosis with fibre-optic interrogation as an in situ potential surgical adjunct. Signal handling with arrays is well exemplified in Chapter 9 (by Kendall et al).
