It Will Just Need a Drop of Blood: Reagent-free Laboratory Diagnostics in Medicine Based on Infrared Spectroscopy

摘要

If you consult a doctor or enter a hospital for a test of for some treatment, blood or urine samples will be taken in most cases that are analyzed in a laboratory. In a big hospital, analysis will be done in a specialized laboratory unit. In smaller hospitals or at your family's doctor, these samples are typically sent by express delivery to a laboratory service. The pressure to reduce health care costs has led to a real "sample tourism" with increasing travelling distances and time lapse between taking the sample and the availability of the blood or urine parameters. Consequently, this may lead to delays for therapies and in turn reduces overall medical efficiency. It is for this reason that health care management more and more aims for a bedside point-of-care-testing where a quick analysis of blood or urine parameters is performed. While this would improve considerably patient supervision on intense care units (ICU), it is equally important in smaller hospitals, in long-term care units for multi-morbid patients or for elderly people. Although there are existing test kits, they are rarely used either because of their high costs or insufficient precision. On the other hand, there is also an enormous potential to reduce costs in large clinical laboratories, simply by the fact that the daily number of blood and urine samples in a large hospital may easily reach several thousands. The costs for reagents used in automated analysis, the daily calibrations required, and in particular costs for labour are a main factor for cost efficiency in health care management.