Tutorial 5: Medical Metrology

Medicine is becoming increasingly quantitative. Continuing innovation in medical sensors has greatly expanded the range of physical variables that can be accurately measured to probe various aspects of the structure, function, and composition of human body. The analysis of the resulting rich streams of information is enabled by the rapidly developing data science techniques, yielding sophisticated quantitative descriptors of disease and therapeutic response (“quantitative biomarkers”). The trend towards measurement-driven medicine opens exciting opportunities for physicists to contribute their expertise in metrology. This tutorial will cover (i) recent advances in medical sensor technologies (How and what do we measure?), (ii) the discovery and validation of quantitative biomarkers (How do we establish whether a given physical measurement is a biomarker?), and (iii) data analysis techniques that enable clinical decision support based on complex, multi-dimensional biomedical measurements (How do we combine multiple biomarkers into a statistical inference framework?).