[Microneedles in diagnosis and treatment: a review]

Microneedles have been developed rapidly in the field of transdermal administration in the past few decades. In recent years, the development of microelectronics technology has expanded the applications of microneedles by combining with microelectronic systems, especially in biological diagnosis and treatment. Different types of microneedles have been designed to extract blood and tissue fluids for detection, or as electrodes to directly detect blood sugar, melanoma and pH in real-time in vivo, both show good prospects for real-time detection applications. In this paper, we review the design of materials and structure of microelectronic-based microneedles, and discuss their advances in biological diagnosis.