Year: 2015
Type: editorial
Abstract: The molecular bases of health and disease have become increasingly well understood in the past 20 years, leading to the need for tests that can provide such information in objective, reproducible forms for clinical research and practice. Much of this clinical information needed by contemporary medicine is referred to as biomarkers. A widely accepted definition of a biomarker, used by both National Institute of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration, is ‘‘a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes or a response to a therapeutic intervention.’’ The term ‘‘biomarker’’ is often assumed to imply a laboratory test, but it can also refer to a clinical measurement like blood pressure or the output of a clinical imaging scan. During the past two decades, remarkable advances in medical imaging technology have made it possible to obtain from clinical images high resolution anatomic, functional, metabolic, and physiologic information, all of which reflect in some way the molecular substrate of the healthy or diseased tissue, organ or person being imaged. With appropriate calibration, most of these imaging technologies can provide quantitative information about some properties of the material with which the energy has interacted. For example:
Language: English
Subfield: Physiology (medical)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1997520518