Diagnostics & Prognostics
The future of affordable, accessible healthcare depends on improved, personalised care, for which diagnostics and therapeutics are the core. New measurement methods, coupled with physiological modelling, are vital in reducing the costs of medical care and developing personalised diagnostics and treatments.
Research and Technology
Diagnosis and treatment will need improved or novel physiological sensors and measurement methods, integrating emerging electronic medical and data management systems with innovative treatments.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s Role
Our researchers are world leading in sensor development, measurements and physiological modelling both at the organ and systems physiology level. A research focus is in personalised diagnoses and treatments targeted to individuals rather than the current “one-size-fits-all” approach.
This will be achieved by linking detailed Physiome/Virtual Physiological Human models of individual organs and systems-level models for specific clinical applications to biological measurements.
An example of current work is model-based diagnostics and therapeutics in pulmonary medicine, and model-driven management of cardiac dysfunction, which calls on local clinical expertise and the associated technical skills of the CMDT researchers in the fields of medical imaging, innovative device design, bioengineering software development, and sensing and remote monitoring.
Two emerging initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand are in tissue and ophthalmic diagnostics and therapeutics which have resulted in new clinical technologies for tissue elasticity measurements and blood perfusion flow. Other expertise related to this research theme is in high frequency (> 50MHz) ultrasound transducer design, manufacture and system integration; microfluidic chip design and fabrication for point of care diagnostics; optoelectronics and optical imaging.