Guest Editorial Special Issue on Microfluidics Engineering for Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Abstract

The thirteen papers included in this special section focus on new biomedical device technologies. The world of biomedical devices is certainly one industrial sector that could benefit the most from microfluidics pointof- care (POC) based diagnostics. Nowadays it is well-known the potential of the POC devices to lead the shift toward the predictive, personalized and preemptive medicine. The idea behind POC devices is to perform a diagnostic test near the patient without the need of any infrastructure and trained personnel. That entails the miniaturization of complex fluids handling, from the single cell to the multi-phase flow, sample manipulation and integrated detection. The scope of this special issue was to bring together contributions focusing on new concepts in POC devices realization and investigate on their applications.