Integration of Molecular Imaging and Biosensors for Disease Diagnosis

Molecular imaging and biosensors are two complementary ways in modern biomedical diagnostics. Molecular imaging enables real-time visualization of molecular and cellular processes in vivo with spatial resolution, while biosensors provide rapid and highly sensitive quantitative detection of biomarkers in body fluids and tissues. The combined application of these two technologies has great potential in disease detection, particularly in early cancer screening, neurological disorders, and infectious disease diagnosis. Clinicians can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of disease progression by combining the spatial distribution information obtained from imaging with the temporal and quantitative signals obtained from biosensors. This integration enables the early prevention of disease deterioration. This review summarizes the fundamental principles of molecular imaging and biosensors, and their advantages and disadvantages are comparatively analyzed, explores their clinical applications and integration strategies, emphasizes the approaches of system integration and the methods of data and signal fusion, and discusses the challenges and future perspectives in clinical translation.