Most patients with acute infectious diseases develop fever, which is
frequently a reason to visit health facilities in resource-limited
settings. The symptomatic overlap between febrile diseases impedes their
diagnosis on clinical grounds. Therefore, the World Health Organization
promotes an integrated management of febrile illness. Along this line,
we present an overview of endemic and epidemic etiologies of fever and
state-of-the-art diagnostic tools used in the field. It becomes evident
that there is an urgent need for the development of novel technologies
to fulfill end-users' requirements. This need can be met with
point-of-care and near-patient diagnostic platforms, as well as e-Health
clinical algorithms, which co-assess test results with key clinical
elements and biosensors, assisting clinicians in patient triage and
management, thus enhancing disease surveillance and outbreak alerts.
This review gives an overview of diagnostic technologies featuring a
platform based approach: (i) assay (nucleic acid amplification
technologies are examined); (ii) cartridge (microfluidic technologies
are presented); (iii) instrument (various detection technologies are
discussed); and at the end proposes a way that such technologies can be
interfaced with electronic clinical decision-making algorithms towards a
broad and complete diagnostic ecosystem.