Point of care technologies for sepsis diagnosis and treatment

Abstract

Sepsis is a rapidly progressing, life threatening immune response triggered by infection that affects millions worldwide each year. Current clinical diagnosis relies on broad physiological parameters and time consuming lab-based cell culture. If proper treatment is not provided, cases of sepsis can drastically increase in severity over the course of a few hours. Development of new point of care tools for sepsis has the potential to improve diagnostic speed and accuracy, leading to prompt administration of appropriate therapeutics, thereby reducing healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes. In this review we examine developing and commercially available technologies to assess the feasibility of rapid, accurate sepsis diagnosis, with emphasis on point of care.