Vomero Maria, Schiavone Giuseppe
BioEE Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Research Management & Innovation Directorate, King's College London, Tower Wing, Guy's Hospital, London SE1 9RT, UK.
Micromachines (Basel). 2021 Nov 29;12(12):1471. doi: 10.3390/mi12121471.
The recent tremendous advances in medical technology at the level of academic research have set high expectations for the clinical outcomes they promise to deliver. To the demise of patient hopes, however, the more disruptive and invasive a new technology is, the bigger the gap is separating the conceptualization of a medical device and its adoption into healthcare systems. When technology breakthroughs are reported in the biomedical scientific literature, news focus typically lies on medical implications rather than engineering progress, as the former are of higher appeal to a general readership. While successful therapy and diagnostics are indeed the ultimate goals, it is of equal importance to expose the engineering thinking needed to achieve such results and, critically, identify the challenges that still lie ahead. Here, we would like to provoke thoughts on the following questions, with particular focus on microfabricated medical devices: should research advancing the maturity and reliability of medical technology benefit from higher accessibility and visibility? How can the scientific community encourage and reward academic work on the overshadowed engineering aspects that will facilitate the evolution of laboratory samples into clinical devices?
近期学术研究层面的医学技术取得了巨大进展，这让人们对其有望带来的临床结果寄予了很高期望。然而，令患者希望破灭的是，一项新技术的颠覆性和侵入性越强，从医疗设备的概念化到其被应用于医疗保健系统之间的差距就越大。当生物医学科学文献报道技术突破时，新闻焦点通常在于医学意义而非工程进展，因为前者对普通读者更具吸引力。虽然成功的治疗和诊断确实是最终目标，但揭示实现这些结果所需的工程思维，以及至关重要的是，识别仍面临的挑战，同样重要。在此，我们想引发对以下问题的思考，尤其关注微制造医疗设备：推动医疗技术成熟度和可靠性的研究是否应受益于更高的可及性和可见度？科学界如何鼓励和奖励在那些被忽视的工程方面的学术工作，这些工作将有助于实验室样本演变为临床设备？
