Current smartphone-assisted point-of-care cancer detection: Towards supporting personalized cancer monitoring

With the rising incidence of cancer-related mortality, new enabling technologies are necessary to offer comprehensive molecular profiles of patients in order to assist clinicians to establish an early presumptive diagnosis. Biosensors that are technically comparable to conventional laboratory diagnostics have been developed. However, because the manufacture and operation processes of these biosensors were not well adjusted for end-users as patients, the approach is not optimized in these newly built platforms. Hence, smartphone-assisted biosensors have been developed for point-of-care utilization. They are faster, simpler, and more affordable than standard examinations and first-generation biosensors, however, they raise numerous concerns regarding their applicability for early cancer detection. Therefore, this review focuses primarily on cutting edge developments in smartphone-assisted biosensing platforms that are most relevant to early cancer diagnosis, including optical and electrochemical biosensors, and cancer imaging. What is needed to bring this important technology to realization as early cancer diagnosis tool is discussed.