In
early 2022, the number of people infected with the highly contagious
mutant severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),
called Omicron, was increasing worldwide. Therefore, several countries
approved the lateral flow assay (LFA) strip as a diagnostic method
for confirming SARS-CoV-2 instead of reverse transcription-polymerase
chain reaction (RT-PCR), which takes a long time to generate the results.
However, owing to the limitation of detection sensitivity, commercial
LFA strips have high false-negative diagnosis rates for patients with
low virus concentrations. Therefore, in this study, we developed a
portable surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-LFA reader based
on localized surface plasmon effects to solve the sensitivity problem
of the commercial LFA strip. We tested 54 clinical samples using this
portable SERS-LFA reader, which generated 49 positive and 5 negative
results. Out of the 49 positive results, SERS-LFA classified only
2 as false negative, while the commercial LFA classified 21 as false
negative. This confirmed that the false-negative rate had significantly
improved compared to that of commercial LFA strips. We believe that
the proposed SERS-LFA system can be utilized as a point-of-care diagnostic
system to quickly and accurately determine a virus infection that
could spread significantly within a short period.
Since COVID-19 and flu have similar symptoms, they are difficult to distinguish without an accurate diagnosis. Therefore, it is critical to quickly and accurately determine which virus was infected and take appropriate treatments when a person has an infection. This study developed a dual-mode surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-based LFA strip that can diagnose SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus with high accuracy to reduce the false-negative problem of the commercial colorimetric LFA strip. Furthermore, using a single strip, it is feasible to detect SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus simultaneously. A clinical test was performed on 39 patient samples (28 SARS-CoV-2 positives, 6 influenza A virus positives, and 5 negatives), evaluating the clinical efficacy of the proposed dual-mode SERS-LFA strip. Our assay results for clinical samples show that the dual-mode LFA strip significantly reduced the false-negative rate for both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus.
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