Instrumentation and measurement in medical, biomedical, and healthcare systems

Proper measurement is crucial in the medical, biomedical, and healthcare fields because it forms the basis of medical diagnosis, prognosis, and evaluation. In fact, it is known that "measuring is the cornerstone of medical research and clinical practice" [1]. Medical professionals such as doctors or clinical laboratory scientists must have confidence in the results reported by their instruments or their measurement methods to make the correct decision for their patient. While in many industries incorrect measurements would simply lead to customer dissatisfaction or loss of money, in the medical field incorrect measurements could be fatal and lead to loss of life. Hence, we can say that proper instrumentation and measurement is vital in the medical field. In this article, we take a look at the latest biomedical topics from the perspective of Instrumentation and Measurement (I&M), and we summarize the latest medical I&M topics published in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement (TIM), to familiarize medical practitioners and researchers in how to achieve a proper medical I&M paper. We also briefly introduce the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society's (IMS) main medical conference, the IEEE Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications (IEEE MeMeA), which promotes the I&M aspects of the medical field in general, and we present guidelines on the I&M aspects that are useful for authors with primarily biomedical backgrounds who would like to publish in IEEE TIM.