"ALGORITHMS: Recipe for low-cost medical tests: FISH and chips"

Ultra-expensive medical tests such as fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) provide early warnings for a variety of diseases that can be cured if caught in time. Unfortunately, only the wealthy can routinely have them performed, because the reagents used in such tests can cost as much as $1 million per gram. Now an electrical engineer at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) has designed a programmable microfluidic chip—reminiscent of the Star Trek "tricorder"—that performs FISH and similar tests with a fraction of the reagents normally required. That can speed the time-to-results by at least tenfold and cut the costs from as much as $1,000 to as low as a dollar.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201000472